The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation publishes a monthly flash report on central government projects costing ₹150 crore or more. The latest, for August 2026, put the cumulative cost overrun at ₹2.88 lakh crore across 1,731 ongoing projects. In April the same report said ₹5.65 lakh crore across 1,981. Read quickly, the central government’s infrastructure overrun halved in four months.

It did not. The monitored set changed. Original cost across the projects fell from ₹37.12 lakh crore to ₹30.72 lakh crore in the same four months. Projects that finish, or are removed, leave the list, and their overrun leaves with them. The overrun as a share of original cost fell from 15.2% to 9.4%, but that is the share on a different set of projects. The flash report gives no list of what left, and since 2025 it no longer says how many of the remaining projects are behind schedule.

Half the overrun, a different set of projects

Press coverage of MoSPI’s monthly flash reports (PIB 2264967 for April, 2303115 for July, 2314852 for August, release dates from this blog’s index). The percentages and the Railways comparison are this blog’s arithmetic on those figures. The June figure of ₹4.93 lakh crore is read from a trade headline that pairs it with a revised cost of ₹40.54 lakh crore; another summary describes ₹4.93 lakh crore differently, so treat June as unconfirmed.

The ministry columns show where the set changed. Between April and August the roads ministry went from 1,137 projects to 982, a fall of 155. Railways went from 260 projects in April to 190 in July and 147 in August. Between July and August the whole set lost 44 projects and ₹3.51 lakh crore of revised cost; Railways accounts for 43 of the projects and ₹3.24 lakh crore of the cost. Power and petroleum, over the same month, gained projects.

There are three possible explanations, and the flash report does not say which applies: the projects were completed and moved to a completed list; they were merged or restated; or they were dropped from the dataset. The totals do not settle it. If the projects that left had simply been finished, most of the revised cost they carried would have been spent, and the cumulative spending on the monitored set would have fallen by about that much. Instead, revised cost fell by ₹9.2 lakh crore between April and August while recorded spending fell by ₹4.0 lakh crore, and new projects added to the set blur the comparison. Without a list of entries and exits, the fall cannot be read as progress.

The count that used to be there

2024 figures from press coverage of the earlier reports (Deccan Chronicle, Tribune and others); the August 2026 report, per the coverage found, does not give counts of overrun or delayed projects.

Earlier reports said how many projects had overrun costs and how many were running late. In January 2024, 431 of 1,821 projects had a cost overrun and 780 were delayed, 115 of them by more than five years. After MoSPI moved to its PAIMANA monitoring portal in September 2025, the reports present projects as “ongoing” with their physical and financial progress. The Wire and ThePrint both observed that the word “delay” stopped appearing in the monthly reports after May 2025. Progress bands (in April, 391 projects at 0–20% complete and 777 at 81–100%, according to The Wire) say how much is built, not whether it is on schedule.

The reasons agencies have long given for time overruns are land acquisition, forest and environment clearances and missing support infrastructure. MoSPI has itself noted in earlier reports that agencies do not always report revised costs and dates, so the overrun figures can understate the problem.

Roads: cheap start, unfinished test

The roads ministry makes up 57% of the monitored projects, with a revised cost of ₹9.52 lakh crore. In April its overrun was only about 3% of cost, and only about 34% of its budget had been spent. Those are young projects; the test of their cost comes later. On 30 September the National Highways Authority began special quality checks on 17 projects with “abnormally low” bids: tender discount above 15%, construction cost above ₹500 crore, physical progress between 35% and 80%. First-round inspections are due by December 2026, with 39 engineers on the teams. Whether very low bids lead to more cost revisions later is the question, and the flash report cannot answer it as published.

What would fix this

• MoSPI should put one line in every flash report: the number of ongoing projects behind their original schedule, and by how many months, as the earlier reports did, with the number that have a cost overrun beside it.
• MoSPI should publish each month a reconciliation of the monitored set: projects added, completed, merged and dropped, with the original cost, revised cost and overrun of each group, so a fall in the total can be explained.
• The Ministries of Railways and Road Transport and Highways should publish the final cost of every project that leaves the monitored set, against its sanctioned cost and date, so completed overruns do not vanish from the record.
• MoSPI, with the project ministries, should publish the reasons for delay in standard categories (land, forest, environment, utilities, contracts, funding) for each late project, with the number of days pending at each agency.
• NHAI should publish the results of the 17-project inspection, and follow those projects’ cost and time revisions, so the case for special checks on low bids is tested against what happens next.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.