Cost overruns decline to 20.34% in April, says new MoSPI report

The anticipated costs of 1,605 infrastructure projects as on May 1 were 20.34% higher than original cost, according to a report by the infrastructure project monitoring division of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released on Tuesday.

The total anticipated cost at Rs 27.5 lakh crore was Rs 4.65 lakh crore higher than the original cost.


The cost overruns were lower compared with the previous month and even lower compared to last April, when 1,559 projects had reported cost overruns of 22.92%.

Nearly half of the 1605 infrastructure projects of the central government with a value of Rs 150 crore and above until May 1 were delayed, of which 54% were delayed for a period of two years.

However, an ET analysis found that the time overrun in projects had reduced compared to last year. The average time overrun was 37.07 months until April 1 down from 42.83 months last year.

While nearly 400 projects were either running ahead of schedule or on schedule, 598 were delayed even with respect of latest date of completion.

Further analysis of data shows that roads transport and highways and railways accounted for 73% of the projects with cost overruns.

In Railways, cost overruns led to a 68.5% enhancement in cost across all projects tracked under the Online Computerised Monitoring System (OCMS), as three in four projects were facing cost overruns.

As a proportion, the number of projects facing cost overruns was lower for roads transport and highways as 146 of 900 projects had the anticipated cost higher than originally envisaged.

In terms of time overruns, 44% of the road projects and nearly 60% of the railways projects were expected to exceed the original time allotted for project completion.

A state-wise comparison shows that among the larger states West Bengal had the highest time overruns with 68.3% of the projects delayed with respect to original schedule, followed by Madhya Pradesh with 68.2% of projects delayed.

On the other hand, Kerala and Maharashtra had less than a third of their projects delayed.

However, the cost overrun was highest for Andhra Pradesh with the entire projects facing a cost overrun of 55% from their original cost.