CAUSES AND IMPACT OF DELAY IN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY OF INDIA

Delays can be well-defined as the escalation of the stipulated time for the completion of the project. Delay is always the major loss to any construction project. In construction projects delay is a very usual thing and it can have an adverse effect on the project's time and cost. As construction is one of the largest economic activity in India, the effects of delay are still in millions, which surely decreases the GDP of the country. Delay makes the process tardy and management of delay is extremely challenging as most of the projects do not meet the expected requirement and fails to perform within time. Therefore, various types and causes of delays should be studied accurately. There are many researches on construction delays but they talk about the wide-ranging reasons of delay, so there stays a high requirement of a notable and feasible study on delays at different stages of construction process in India. The aim of the paper is to identify the causes of delays at different stages of construction through questionnaire survey in Indian construction industry. Analytical tools used in this research are relative importance index (RII) and spearman's rank correlation coefficient to rank the sources of delay with respect to its occurrence in the various stages of the construction project. The study concludes based on the correlation coefficient analysis between the construction stages, that the delays associated with before-construction stage is least related, with after-construction stage is third highly related, with construction stage is second highly related and delays associated with average/overall construction is highly related.