India Inc’s investment appetite is visibly returning, but converting project announcements into factories, power plants, transmission lines and infrastructure remains the harder half of the journey. Across sectors, companies are wrestling with a familiar checklist of ground-level frictions: land, right of way (RoW), statutory approvals, skilled workers, specialised contractors, transformers and grid connectivity.
The scale of the pipeline is what makes execution the central question. Fresh project announcements surged 27.7% year-on-year to Rs 14.8 lakh crore in Q1FY27, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), while new private-sector announcements jumped more than 72% year-on-year to Rs 13.3 lakh crore — driven by nuclear energy and data centres, among other sectors. The burst followed a mixed FY26, when fresh announcements slipped 13% year-on-year to Rs 44 lakh crore.
There is an encouraging counterpoint in the data: the value of stalled projects fell to a 12-year low of 5.5% in FY26, CMIE said, down from nearly 11% in 2014-15. India, in other words, has become better at finishing what it starts. The test now is to keep it that way as the pipeline swells — and to ensure a bigger order book does not quietly become a new backlog.
On the ground, top executives and experts say, that is easier said than done.
For the conglomerates leading the capex charge, the choke points begin literally at ground level. An Adani group executive said RoW and workers for transmission-line erection were major constraints in project execution. “There is an acute shortage of gangmen for erection of transmission lines,” he said.
Notably, companies are no longer waiting for the ecosystem to fix itself. The Adani group has set up a training centre in Jharkhand offering a free three-month course to build its own pipeline of linemen, and is ordering thermal equipment in advance amid shortages of boiler, turbine and generator components — in effect, stockpiling both skills and steel.
A senior Tata group executive flagged the same pair of problems: RoW and grid connectivity. “Due to grid connectivity and load challenges, curtailments are happening,” he said.
For the engineering firms that actually pour the concrete and string the wires, a project that is ready on paper does not guarantee a ready work front. Vimal Kejriwal, MD and CEO of KEC International, said converting investment intent into execution at a planned pace was a clear challenge.
“Transmission projects can face RoW, land, site-access and statutory-approval delays, while civil projects face shortages of skilled labour and specialised contractors,” he said. The numbers give a sense of the strain: KEC’s manpower requirement can reach 27,000-30,000 workers at peak periods. The firm is responding by substituting machines for missing hands — cranes, drone-assisted stringing, prefabrication and automated equipment.
Kalpataru Projects International has taken a similar route, using mechanisation, process improvements and training to address labour shortages. Amit Uplenchwar, director at the company, said RoW had been a challenge in some opportunities — enough, in fact, for the firm to simply walk away from projects carrying execution risk. That contractors are now pricing execution risk into their bidding decisions is itself a telling signal.
Hardware is the other pinch point. Simarpreet Singh, executive director and CEO of Hartek Power, said transformer lead times had stretched to 9-12 months, potentially leaving completed facilities waiting for grid synchronisation — a finished plant idling for want of a single piece of equipment. He also flagged shortages of skilled engineers, specialised EPC partners and certified technical site professionals.
Renewable energy shows how execution constraints can bite well before construction begins. Ravi Verma, member of the governing council of the Sustainable Projects Developers Association (SPDA), said the broader ecosystem was struggling to keep pace with investment. “These constraints are also making global investors more cautious about participating in India’s renewable energy growth story,” he said.
The starkest number in the sector: around 43 GW of renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) have been awarded but remain unsigned, Verma said. That gap between award and firm offtake leaves developers holding projects nobody has yet committed to buy power from — creating uncertainty and delaying capital deployment.
A proposed ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) one-time relief mechanism, including a waiver of inter-state transmission system (ISTS) charges and deemed renewable purchase obligation (RPO) compliance for procurers, could help unlock these projects, he added.
Verma also pointed to a sequencing problem in renewable-rich states, where grid infrastructure is lagging generation capacity. “India has the capital, technology and investment appetite to support its clean-energy ambitions. But the priority now is to ensure that transmission, offtake, land, approvals, supply chains and policy frameworks move in parallel with generation capacity,” he said.
That diagnosis — money is not the missing ingredient — was echoed by Shilpa Kumar, managing director and head of British International Investment (BII) India. “The solution is not more capital but better aligned capital,” she said, advocating patient development-stage funding and experienced partners to manage execution risk.
Pratik Agarwal, chairman of Resonia & Serentica Renewables and MD of Sterlite Electric, framed it as an incentive-design problem. “The need of the hour is to expedite transmission to match renewables,” he said, arguing that the framework should reward early completion rather than merely penalise delay.
The constraints are not confined to energy. Gokul Jaykrishna, chairman of FICCI Gujarat Council, said India had made significant progress on ease of doing business, but “there is a long way to go” and labour laws need improvement.
Sometimes the disruptions are almost prosaic. Mahesh Patel, managing director of Procyon Technology, which makes fasteners for oil and gas firms, said labour shortages delayed his factory expansion after workers returned to West Bengal for assembly elections last year. “There is a need for automation that will reduce workforce,” he added.
Yet the story is not uniformly one of friction — and Tamil Nadu offers proof that speed is possible. J. Rafiq Ahmed, managing director of Kothari Industrial Corporation, said group firm Phoenix Kothari Footwear’s Perambalur plant in the state became operational within a year of its 2022 agreement and now employs more than 3,000 people. Where land, labour and approvals align, projects can move from paper to payroll in twelve months.
India’s capex challenge, in short, has shifted shape. For much of the past decade, the question was whether companies wanted to invest at all. That question has largely been answered: capital and appetite are increasingly available, and the announcement pipeline is the fattest in years.
The new test is one of logistics rather than confidence — whether land, labour, power, equipment and approvals can move in sync, and at the pace the pipeline now demands. The stalled-projects ratio at a 12-year low suggests the system has learned to execute. The Rs 14.8-trillion quarter will show whether it has learned to execute at scale.
