Study of Factors for Cost Overrun in Road Construction Projects

India has a road network of over 4,236,000 kilometers in 2011, the third largest road network in the world. At 0.66 km of roads per square kilometer of land, the quantitative density of India's road network is similar to that of the United States (0.65) and far higher than that of China (0.16) or Brazil (0.20). However, qualitatively India's roads are a mix of modern highways and narrow, unpaved roads, and are undergoing drastic improvement. India in its past did not allocate enough resources to build or maintain its road network. The success of the construction projects mainly depend on their accomplishment of essential factors such as cost, time and quality. In case cost and time are not properly planned and utilized, the project will not accomplish its goals and will cause failure to the overall project. It is essential to find out various critical factors which are mostly influencing the cost overruns, its origin, causes, and problems associated are also to be identified. Finding out the causes of cost overrun and rectification of the causes will be very useful to achieve the goals; scope of the project, to maximize the return on investment, to complete the project within actual budgeted cost and to minimize the wastage of funds, will avoid such critical instances to occur in future.