539 central projects run into time over runs: Govt to Parliament

As of February 1, 2021, out of 1,739 central sector projects, 539 projects are having time overrun and 209 projects are showing both costs overrun and time overrun, Parliament was informed Thursday. Of these 209 projects, 109 are in railways, 24 in roads, transport and highways sector, and 21 each in power and petroleum.

“The reasons for delay are project-specific, depend on a variety of technical, financial and administrative factors, and differ from project to project,” statistics minister Rao Inderjit Singh told Rajya Sabha.

However, delay in land acquisition and forest clearance has been one of the important reasons for delay in the completion of the projects as reported by the project implementing agencies. The delay in completion or time overrun in respect of the original schedule of the Central Sector Infrastructure Projects is one of the important reasons for the escalation of construction cost.


In a separate reply, he also said that technological interventions like 'Computer Assisted Personal Interview' (CAPI) has been introduced to reduce the time lag between completion of field work of survey and publication of results. Further, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation is developing a General Survey Solution called 'e-Survey Instrument and Generalised Multimodal Application' (e-SIGMA) and real time validation that would reduce the time lag.

The ministry is utilizing handheld devices such as tablets for capturing data in the surveys of Periodic Survey of Labour Force, Time Use Survey, Socio-Economic Survey on Debt and Investment, Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural households, Multiple Indicator Survey and Urban Frame Survey, statistics minister Rao Inderjit Singh said.