Legal-Institutional Drivers of Strategic Misalignment in India's Public-Sector Infrastructure Projects: A Mixed-Methods Study Combining Regulatory Analysis, Secondary Statistical Evidence, and a Primary Practitioner Survey

Abstract

India has expanded public infrastructure investment sharply over the past decade, yet official monitoring continues to show that a substantial share of centrally sanctioned projects run over cost, over time, or both. This paper argues that these visible symptoms sit on top of a deeper problem — strategic misalignment, where a project that eventually gets built still fails to serve the long-term institutional purpose that justified approving it — and that this misalignment owes as much to India's legal and regulatory architecture as to administrative practice. Drawing on a PRISMA-adapted review of the institutional-governance and megaproject-management literatures, the paper builds a framework grounded in the statutes and case law that actually govern Indian infrastructure delivery: land acquisition under the 2013 RFCTLARR Act, environmental and forest clearance law, financial-sanction rules under the General Financial Rules, sector statutes for highways, railways, and electricity, and the contract and arbitration law behind public–private partnerships, illustrated through the fourteen-year Delhi Metro Rail Corporation v. Delhi Airport Metro Express dispute. The framework is then tested two ways. A secondary-data analysis of Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) Flash Reports from 2017 to 2026 applies a chi-square test, a Kruskal–Wallis test, and a correlation/regression trend test. A new 240-respondent practitioner survey, analysed through reliability testing, exploratory factor analysis, and structural equation modelling, tests five legal-institutional constructs against a latent strategic-misalignment outcome. The secondary data show overrun incidence essentially unchanged across four reporting periods (χ² = 3.69, df = 3, p = .297), a directional but non-significant sector effect (H = 4.50, p = .105), and a borderline downward trend in overrun severity between 2018 and 2026 (r = -.72, p = .066). The survey-based model fits the data well (χ²(284) = 316.50, p = .090; CFI = .985; TLI = .983; RMSEA = .022) and identifies contractual/arbitration risk (β = .35, p < .001), land acquisition risk (β = .23, p = .004), and institutional coordination weakness (β = .22, p = .010) as the strongest predictors of perceived misalignment, together explaining 53 per cent of its variance. Read together, the legal record, the secondary statistics, and the practitioner data point the same way: closing India's infrastructure alignment gap requires reform of appraisal law, land law, and arbitration practice, not project management alone.