Only 12% of India's transmission projects awarded through competitive bidding and commissioned by March 2026 met their original scheduled completion date, according to a note from ratings agency ICRA. The remainder were commissioned anywhere from two months to three years late, with a median delay of more than 10 months. ICRA attributes the pattern primarily to land acquisition disputes, right-of-way clearances, and regulatory approvals rather than financing or equipment availability, even as the country enters a five-year cycle expected to bring roughly $52 billion to $62 billion (₹5 lakh crore to ₹6 lakh crore) in new transmission capital spending.
The finding matters well beyond India. It is one of the clearest available data points showing that land and right-of-way acquisition, not capital commitment or equipment procurement, is the constraint most consistently blowing past its planned schedule on large transmission projects. Ankit Jain, ICRA's vice president and co-group head, said the sector continues to face significant execution risk because of difficulties acquiring land and resolving right-of-way disputes, on top of standard regulatory clearances.
Why Only 12% of India's Transmission Projects Hit Their Original Schedule
The 12% figure covers projects awarded through India's tariff-based competitive bidding process, the mechanism the country uses to select private developers for transmission lines needed to move renewable generation onto the grid. These are not marginal or poorly capitalized projects. They cleared a competitive bidding process specifically because they were judged ready to build. The fact that nearly nine in ten still missed their original in-service date suggests the sequencing problem sits upstream of financing and construction readiness, in the process of actually securing the corridor the line will run through.
How Right-of-Way Disputes Compound Into Multi-Year Delays
Right-of-way acquisition for a transmission line is not a single negotiation but hundreds or thousands of individual landowner agreements strung along a single route, any one of which can hold up the whole corridor. A dispute with one landowner, a valuation disagreement, or a legal challenge to a condemnation proceeding does not just delay that one parcel. It can delay every downstream construction milestone tied to that segment of the route, which is why median delays run past 10 months even on projects that cleared financing and permitting on schedule.
U.S. Transmission Projects Face the Same Land Acquisition Sequencing Problem
The same structural sequencing shows up in current U.S. 765-kilovolt transmission proposals moving through Texas's Public Utility Commission. Under the standard process, detailed engineering design and land acquisition begin only after a specific route is selected and approved, meaning a commission decision delay pushes back land acquisition before it can even start. Texas's PUCT voted in June to pause, or "abate," one pending 765-kV line application until a later date, illustrating how a single regulatory decision point can reset the land acquisition clock for an entire project years before construction begins.
Why State Eminent Domain Law Changes Are Adding a New Layer of Uncertainty
Several states have introduced legislation this year that would change the terms under which transmission developers can acquire land, according to a legal analysis from Womble Bond Dickinson. A Michigan bill would raise the evidentiary standard a court must apply before approving a condemnation for a transmission route, while a Maryland measure would let property owners near an acquired parcel recover compensation for diminished property value. Neither bill blocks transmission development outright, but each adds a variable to land acquisition timelines that developers could not have modeled a year ago, on top of the acquisition process itself.
What This Means for Capital Plans Built Around Optimistic Timelines
Capital plans that treat land acquisition as a fixed, back-office task rather than a scheduling risk with its own failure modes are working from an assumption the data no longer supports. The India figures suggest that even projects with financing and regulatory approval already in hand, and a completed competitive bidding process behind them, still have close to a one-in-ten chance of hitting their original schedule. Finance and infrastructure teams modeling transmission-dependent projects should treat right-of-way acquisition as its own line item with its own contingency. That applies whether the project depends on renewable interconnection, data center power delivery, or industrial electrification. It is not a formality that happens automatically once a route is chosen.
