India?s largest engineering and construction company Larsen & Toubro, which slashed its order book growth guidance by one-third to 5% for the financial year in October from 15%, has won R5,195 crore fresh orders in the past two months to build factories, metro railways, roads and power transmission lines.

The order for two months are 17% lower than the R6,264 crore the company booked in the same period in 2010, signalling that Indian companies have cut down its planned investments. Policy delays, high interest rates and global uncertainty are preventing Indian companies from making heavy investments to build power and fertiliser plants and refineries, analysts say. This has translated into fewer orders for construction companies.

Ajit Gulabchand-promoted HCC saw its order book for the second quarter ended September 30, 2011 plunge 18% to R16,175 crore against R19,735 crore last year. Public sector Bharat Heavy Electricals, too, showed a moderate increase of 4.5% in its order book for the second quarter, at R161,000 crore compared to R154,000 crore a year ago.

On Wednesday, L&T said it received R2,700 crore of fresh orders apart from R1,629 crore contract orders in November and R875 crore orders from overseas companies.

?In the past six months, there has been a lack of inertia on various issues which has resulted in slow decision making and certain project clearances getting hampered,? SN Subrahmanyan, senior executive vice-president, construction, L&T, said. ?We have already increased our thrust on overseas businesses.?

?These sort of orders are not good enough for L&T,? Sanjeev Zarbade, vice-president (research), Kotak Securities, said. ?With the economic environment remaining down, companies like L&T will get affected. A number of projects are getting held up due to lack of clarity on policy, and high rates are preventing firms from making big investments,? he added.

The new investments in the fiscal September 2011 quarter were only R2.6 lakh crore, about 64% lower than the peak of R7.2 lakh crore achieved in the June 2010 quarter, a Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) report said. It said policy paralysis, global uncertainties and high interest rates are hampering capacity addition in India.

?Big sized investments of anywhere between R3,000 and R4,000 crore are unlikely to come in for at least the next six months,? Manish Kayal, an analyst with Centrum Broking, said.