Maharashtra has earned the dubious distinction of being the state with the maximum number of delayed infrastructure projects in the country as per the report released by the Central government’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MSPI). Out of the 1,420 projects monitored by the MSPI, Maharashtra has 43 projects which have run into cost and time overruns. Maharashtra is followed by Uttar Pradesh, which has 40 delayed projects. Bihar and Odisha stand at third place with 26 projects each. These are the projects undertaken by the Central government which are above INR 150 crore in cost and are in sectors like roads, railways, aviation, power, petroleum among others. The original cost of the projects, which are delayed in Maharashtra, was INR 1.52 lakh crore but due to time and cost overruns their cost has increased to INR 1.62 lakh crore.
The cost of project in the case of Uttar Pradesh has increased from INR 94,778 crore to INR 98,178 crore. In the case of Bihar, the cost of projects has gone up by a whopping 70.16 %, rising to INR 80,380 crore from INR 47,239 crore. For Odisha, the cost has increased from INR 67,212 crore to INR 71,624 crore. A former Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) Commissioner who did not want to be identified said, “Apart from typical reasons like environmental clearance, delays in land acquisition, one of the major reasons behind delays is that Indian contractors don’t have a bandwidth to complete the projects on time. To finish the projects on time, we need more international players coming in. However, due to our lopsided contracts which favour nodal agency the most, many international players stay away from India.”
Total original cost of implementation of the 1,420 projects was INR 18,05,667.72 crore, and their anticipated completion cost is likely to be INR 21,63,672.09 crore, which reflects overall cost overruns of INR 3,58,004.37 crore (19.83 % of the original cost). The expenditure incurred on these projects till September 2018 was INR 7,83,503 crore, which is 36.21 % of the anticipated cost of the projects.
Source: Mumbai Mirror
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