Factors causing delay in construction projects

The heart of any Construction project is the client and the client’s major goals are budget, on time schedule and a robust quality including other specific objectives such as safety concerns and market entry that depends on the project nature and the company. In certain infrastructure projects, short construction duration is key to success considering the fact as the concession period includes the construction period also particularly in the BOT projects (Build Operate Transfer).In this type of projects, cash flow is one of the major problems and the cash flow starts only after the concession period. Thus the delay in the completing of the project would result in loss of revenue to all the stakeholders involved in the project .the most affected would be the promoter.

The dilemma of delay in the construction sector is a universal happening. India is also no exemption to be affected by delays in the construction. A research carried out by the Infrastructure and Project Monitoring Division of the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation reports, states that out of 646 central sector projects whooping cost around $50 trillion and an average project duration of six to seven years, about 40% are behind schedule with the period of delay ranging from 1 to 252 months. Since the schedule overrun leads to cost overrun of the projects, it is important to know the factors causing the schedule overrun of the projects.

On the other hand, the internal factors that affect the time and cost and performance in projects have been extensively published within mainstream construction management research, at least in the Indian scenario. Even though the analysis of this lingering issue of time performance of construction projects is still difficult to scrutinize. The reasons and factors that affect the timetable and cost performance by adopting numerous techniques, most of these studies failed to examine how the identified causes collectively work together to influence schedule performance in construction projects which ultimately causes delay. Moreover, in producing area-specific identification of the causes and factors without understanding the collective influence on schedule performance in quantitative terms.

Quality of project is defined by various quality professionals. The simplest definition of quality is meeting or exceeding client’s satisfaction. Whichever definition is followed for quality professionals or any definitions are used to define project quality, it is a very difficult task when trying to put it into real practice. For an end user, quality is nothing but satisfaction with the appearance, performances, and reliability of the project for a given price range. From the perspective of an end user, his concept of quality is only the internal satisfaction with appearances of an element, his performance, and reliability, durability of the project in the specified budget. In the territory of Project Management, factors such as cost, quality, and schedule are termed as an iron triangle.

One of the famous quotes by a Babylonian king was that if a contractor builds a house by compromising the quality of the construction, which results in a collapse of the structure causing the death of the owner, the contractor should be sentenced to death. Current building laws and regulations prevent such grim penalties in the present scenario, but these can consequently lead to low productivity, extra expenses, and reworks, defects because of rework and repair, re-inspection. Poor quality can hamper the reputation of the industry in the future, and if the organization continues to perform in a similar manner it may end up going bankrupt and may lead to loss of numerous projects due to its negative impression in the market.

The construction industry in India is wrestling with a 30% labor shortage due to the unexpected boom in the construction industry at an unmatched pace which was also endorsed by findings in the report published by Ernst & Young (2011) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. This was also further reiterated by “Indian Construction Sector: The Great Leap Forward,” which stated that “labor shortage would be nailed with 65% by the next decade, as more and more workers are shifting from conventional on- site and real estate jobs to white collar jobs in the service industry.“As the construction industry had a good performance over the past few years, the volume of construction has been increased by leaps and bounds, which has been led to the high requirement of the labor workforce “. Since the demand for labor is the rise, there has been pressure on wages. “The cost has definitely escalated.”

Indian Construction Industry is driven by labor which is from the migrant population so it‟s very seasonal. The labor population from India for construction of urban areas comes from rural areas in states such as Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and many more. The Indian construction industry is highly dependent on skilled manpower in order to get the desired quality of the projects. The industry is poles apart from the western and European world as they are highly mechanized and also highly industrialized .they not even use 20% of the labors which are used in India for the construction work.

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