New Delhi: In the roughly 12 years since the Narendra Modi government came to power, India’s infrastructure pipeline has expanded nearly fourfold in value. Over the same period, the Union government has changed how it reports the progress of these projects to the public. While earlier governments explicitly tracked delays in execution, especially of high-value projects, the Modi government chooses to spotlight the stage of completion such projects have reached.The result is that more dashboards and real-time portals have entered governance, but the reports themselves function as limited instruments of accountability.A prime example of this is the latest data shared by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) in its Flash Report for April 2026. When compared with the Flash Reports for April 2014 or April 2001, this difference in reporting styles becomes obvious.Economic changesWhereas the 2026 report tracks 1,941 central sector infrastructure projects costing Rs 150 crore and above, the 2014 report tracked 727 such projects. The 2001 report tracked only 191, which was in sync with the size of the economy. India is now building more power plants, highways, ports, airports than in 2014 or 2001. But the government is less transparent about how efficiently they are progressing.The cost of these projects has also increased significantly. Together, says the April 2026 report, the 1,941 projects had an original approved cost of Rs 35.89 lakh crore. By contrast, the 727 projects underway in the penultimate month in power of the United Progressive Alliance had a combined original cost of Rs 9.45 lakh crore. The Narendra Modi government assumed office on May 26, 2014.Some other broad-brush details in the April 2026 report are worth noting. For example, the cost of all infrastructure projects has risen to Rs 41.50 lakh crore – Rs 5.61 lakh crore higher than the original sanctioned cost, which are normally called “overruns”, though the report does not use this term.In April 2014 as well, there were cost overruns: The government expected to spend Rs 1.88 lakh crore more than it had calculated to complete the 727 projects. That brought the expenditure to Rs 11.34 lakh crore from the Rs 9.45 lakh crore approved.In percentage terms, the cost overruns were higher in April 2014, at 20%. In April 2026, the overrun was 15.6%. In 2001, the overruns were around 17%.But this is where the like-to-like comparisons between 2014 and 2026 must end.How reporting in 2026 has changedFirst, as the total value of monitored projects nearly quadrupled, cumulative overruns also nearly tripled in absolute terms. Much larger sums of public capital are tied up in delayed execution now.Next, the government no longer refers to delays but accounts for the status of infrastructure projects in terms of physical progress or “ongoing projects”. This coincides with the government’s shift to the PAIMANA system, a web-based real-time tracker of projects launched in September 2025 to replace the earlier computerised system.The government archived older reports when it launched PAIMANA. In the run-up to its launch, the monthly Flash Reports still referred to delays in project execution up-front, but this stops after May 2025. From June onwards, the reports start describing projects as “ongoing” – “delay” disappears from their language.This has made a big difference, because once the flash reports stopped explicitly stating how many central-sector projects are delayed, it could also no longer state how many are on schedule or even ahead of schedule.Consider the April 2026 Flash Report again. A graph in it shows 391 projects in the 0-20% completion range, 222 in the 21-40% range, 243 in the 41-60% range, 308 in the 61-80% range and 777 projects in the 81-100% completion bracket, adding up to 1,941 projects. To be fair, a database provided in Table 6 lists all 1,941 pending (ongoing) infrastructure projects, along with details related to costs, revised estmates, expenditure so far, commissioning stage and so on. However, the report itself does not aggregate or classify projects by delay or duration of delay, as the older reports did. This means the raw, unsorted data is all researchers and economists or curious members of the public have to go by. Any of the target audiences of the flash reports could compute the delays and other scheduling changes based on this raw data. However, that analysis would belong to the individual researchers or institutions – not to the public.Change in attitude towards reportingThe April 2014 Flash Report explicitly stated that 282 out of 727 monitored projects were behind time. The first paragraph of its executive summary sets the deadpan tone for the rest of the disclosures:The Flash Report for April 2014 contains information on the status of the 727 Central Sector Infrastructure Projects costing 150 crore and above. During April 2014, no project has reported completion.It then classified projects according to how late they were: 65 projects were running behind by up to 12 months, 71 were 13-24 months late, 80 by 25-60 months and 66 projects by more than 61 months.The report also identified 123 projects as being on schedule and five as ahead of schedule. No such information is now provided, unless statistical methods are applied to raw data for all 1,941 projects listed in Table 6 in the 2026 report.Governments did not hold backThe April 2014 Flash Report – delivered in an election month – even included a warning that reporting gaps may have understated the true scale of overruns! It then confessed that 295 projects had neither a commissioning year nor a tentative gestation period, and that several agencies had failed to update their revised estimates of expenditure or new schedules.It reported the projects that had been delayed over the course of the previous month. Think of it like a government marking concentric circles until it has pin-pointed every schedule going off-track. To top it off, a bureaucratic warning note was attached to three of the lists of ministry-wise delayed projects in the following (exact) words:N.B.: The Chief Executive of the Project Implementing Agency and the Senior Financial Advisor of the concerned administrative Ministry may like to take a special review of these projects in order to avoid further time overruns.Now such projects are reported as how “completed” they are, not how delayed. Therefore, no such instructions (reprimands) are issued – at least, not before the public eye.But there is more to the 2014 report. It listed reasons for the delays:The brief reasons for time overruns, as reported by various project implementing agencies, are delay in land acquisition, forest clearance, delay in supply of equipment, fund constraints, geological surprises, equipment erection, geo-mining conditions, shortage of labour, inadequate mobilisation by the contractor, Maoist problems, court cases, contractual issues, ROU/ROW problems and law-and-order situations.ROU and ROW are right of use and right of way, which often create problems in infrastructure projects, say, when villagers refuse to give up their land for a power plant, or if an expressway approaches an over-bridge, which the railways oppose. In 2023, Mumbai authorities built a flyover leading to nowhere precisely because it could not resolve a ROW/ROU problem with the railways.But the 2026 report’s contents page sets an entirely different tone. The word “delay” does not feature even once in it, or in the entire report. Nor do the words “overrun” or “scheduled” feature in it.While the emphasis in the earlier reporting format was on accountability and adherence to schedules – were ministries meeting deadlines? How much they had failed to do so? – the current format puts the stage of execution and what is “ongoing” in the foreground. So, even for delayed (or severely delayed) projects, it now says – 10% complete, 20% or 90% complete.A project might stall for years, even after being “90%” complete. Still it would appear as an advanced-stage project in the current system rather than as a severely delayed one.It is important to note that what the government reveals on PAIMANA might be very different from what the line ministries see. They have different logins for updating data into the system, while the public see only what is revealed. Still, even if accountability might be ongoing within top levels of government, it is hidden from public view, even for public-funded projects.Even before 2014, obsessive delay trackingThe April 2001 Flash Report is the first report listed on the PAIMANA portal’s archival section. It was made in the “old” format – digitised, but not real-time or automated. It is in black and white, unlike the colour-coded reports prepared by PAIMANA.The threshold size of each of the 191 projects tracked in the April 2001 report was also lower – Rs 100 crore. It revealed that 32% of these were delayed, and the cost overrun was 17.5%.Like the 2014 report, the April 2001 report also tracked “additional delays”, identifying 14 ongoing projects that were delayed after the last flash report was published.On top of listing delays, it laid out the original approved cost, the latest approved cost, and the escalation in expenditure. It then disclosed the “anticipated” cost of projects – revealing that more cost escalations were expected. This transparency could have been the result of ministries providing honest accounts of the hurdles impeding their marquee projects. Or, nobody in government thought there was a way out – the reports just had to be put out.The Flash Reports are not strictly for public consumption in the ordinary sense. They are used by experts who track the Indian economy’s progress, especially infrastructure development and efficiency, which determine investor interest. Still, the shortcoming (not reporting delays clearly) is being noticed, as the Financial Express reported on May 28, “The ministry [of statistics and programme implementation] did not disclose the exact number of projects facing overruns” in the April 2026 Flash Report.This is markedly different from the situation in April 2001, as another sample of the data from that report shows:This table basically says that the Tarapur nuclear project was ahead of schedule. Medapali was on time, while Pootki Balihari was severly delayed, as were Jhanjra and Parej. The Gouthamkhani project cost had fallen before work began.Such detail can be gleaned from the report in 2026, but only after pulling out the raw data for all 1,941 projects – a significant effort and then the results would still be open to interpretation – is a two-year delay to be categorised as “severe” or “moderate”?To be clear, it was the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s second NDA government, formed after the 1999 general election, that was in power when the 2001 report was released. It was dealing with lingering effects of US sanctions after the Pokhran tests, the aftermath of the Kargil war and the delayed impact of the dot-com bust. It was also heading for defeat in the 2004 Lok Sabha election.Yet past governments kept tracking milestone achievements against targets long before dashboards and real-time portals entered governance. The reports themselves functioned as instruments of accountability.Note: The data in Flash Reports now often lags slightly behind data on the PAIMANA portal, which is updated in real time by many ministries, which explains why some recent media reports based on the live portal cite 1,981 projects with a revised cost of Rs 42.78 lakh crore. The PAIMANA archive of older Flash Reports, maintained separately for reasons unknown, is here.