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Over 500 Central Sector Infrastructure Projects costing ₹150 crore or more are facing an average delay of over 32 months. This has resulted in a cost overrun of nearly 20 per cent, a flash report by Statistics Ministry showed.
As many as “541 projects are delayed with respect to their original schedules and 75 projects have reported additional delays vis-à-vis their date of completion, reported in the previous month. Of these 75 projects, 28 are mega projects costing ₹1,000 crore and above,” the flash report said, showing status as on December 1. The report has been prepared by Infrastructure and Project Monitoring Division under Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
Projects here include those related with road, railway, petroleum, power, mines, higher education beside 18 others.
A total of 1,679 projects have been included in the report. Of these, 11 projects are ahead of schedule, 292 are on schedule, 541 are delayed, 439 projects have reported cost overrun and 212 projects reported both time and cost overrun with respect to their original project implementation schedules. However, “the number of delayed projects decreases to 385 if delay is calculated on the basis of latest schedule of completion. Furthermore, for 835 projects, neither the year of commissioning nor the tentative gestation period has been reported,” the report said.
Key reasons
The report has listed 15 key reasons for delay. These include delay in land acquisition, delay in obtaining forest/environment clearances, lack of infrastructure support & linkages, delay in tie-up of project financing, delay in finalisation of detailed engineering, change in scope, delay in tendering, contractual issue and State-wise lockdown due to Covid-19 beside other.
“The concerned administrative Ministry may like to review the projects in order to avoid further cost overrun, time overruns, to firm-up milestones in case of milestone is not available, to firm-up revised cost estimates and revised commissioning schedule if the same has been not revised and lapsed,” the report. Further, it expressed concern over no reporting of revised cost estimates and commissioning schedules for many projects, which suggests that time/cost overrun figures are under reported.
Because of delay in almost one third of total number of projects under review, the total cost has gone up.
The report said that total original cost of implementation of the 1,679 projects was nearly over ₹26-lakh crore, but now the anticipated cost is around ₹ 26.68-lakh crore showing a cost overrun of over ₹ 4.38-lakh crore which is around of 20 per cent of original cost. Till November, around 48 per cent of cost has been spent on all these projects.
According to officials, the mechanism of Standing Committee in the Ministries identifies reasons for time and cost overruns and agencies/individual responsible for delay and cost overruns. The recommendations of the Committee are implemented by the Ministries concerned which then submit Action Taken Report along with the revised cost estimates for approval of the Cabinet.
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