India’s National Highways Authority (NHAI) has a problem it cannot tender its way out of. Three highway packages spanning 912.3 km across Maharashtra and Gujarat, worth Rs 18,884.69 crore, attracted no bids under the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model. In this, a private developer finances and builds a road, and recoups the cost through toll collection over a 20–30-year concession.

The deadline was extended. Concession agreements were revised. Still nothing.

The silence is diagnostic. IRB Infrastructure carries Rs 3,500–4,000 crore in outstanding NHAI payments, and it expects to recover over two to three years. Ashoka Buildcon has Rs 700 crore in asset-sale proceeds contingent on concession extensions, its CFO says, which will take one to two years to materialise.

KNR Constructions has flagged cutthroat competition eroding margins as a structural feature of how NHAI awards contracts.

Three companies, the same underlying stress, priced three different ways.

No single project illustrates the gap between stated ambition and delivery reality better than the Delhi–Mumbai Expressway. At 1,386 km, it is India’s longest expressway and was conceived as the reference benchmark for all greenfield construction that followed.

Originally promised for 2024, it slipped to October 2025. Three packages in Gujarat are now targeted for FY 2027–28, and the full corridor to Mumbai has no confirmed date.

This matters because developers do not price projects against NHAI’s stated ambitions. They price them against what the ground actually requires.

The Delhi–Mumbai Expressway has slipped three successive deadlines; when NHAI now offers a two-year BOT concession on a 200-km greenfield corridor, the market applies the same scepticism discount built from that direct experience.

The BOT-Toll model’s share of yearly highway awards fell from an already low 2% in FY23 to zero in FY24. NHAI has since announced 53 BOT projects worth approximately Rs 2 lakh crore. The Delhi–Mumbai Expressway is not a peripheral cautionary tale. It is the centrepiece of the market’s doubt.

The Reluctant Market

India abandoned the BOT toll model roughly a decade ago after actual traffic volumes on newly opened corridors routinely fell 30–50% below the projections underpinning project financing . It made debt difficult to service, leaving lenders and NHAI holding assets worth far less than forecast.

The government responded with the Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM), under which it makes fixed semi-annual payments to the developer regardless of how much traffic uses the road, eliminating traffic risk entirely.

HAM worked so well that it reconditioned the entire industry. Developer balance sheets, lender credit models, and rating frameworks are all now calibrated to government-backed cashflows.

PNC Infratech has a pipeline of 76 projects worth over Rs 1 lakh crore, almost all under HAM or EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction, where the government similarly bears all traffic risk).

G R Infraprojects has stated plainly that if a developer cannot see a 15% return on investment from toll revenues, the project either goes HAM or does not get built.

In response, the government has amended the Model Concession Agreement (MCA), the standard contract template, to include termination payments covering up to 150% of equity and 100% of debt; a floor-and-cap clause that adjusts the concession period by up to 20% depending on actual traffic; and NHAI financial support of up to 40% of project cost.

These might be meaningful protections, but they have not produced a single bid across 912 km of tendered highway.

What Two Years Actually Require

The National Highways Builders Federation wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office, setting out what a two-year deadline must accommodate on a 200-km greenfield corridor: land acquisition, utility shifting across power, water, and telecom, major structures, interchanges, and safety provisions. Each has its own statutory timetable that runs independently of any construction contract.

Land acquisition in Maharashtra and Gujarat runs through revenue department processes and court proceedings that cannot be pre-scheduled. KNR Constructions has reported tenders where only 60–65% of the required land was available at the time of bid. Ashoka Buildcon has described bridge projects stuck entirely on land acquisition. These are not edge cases. They are the operating norm. Developers price in the timelines the ground says rather than the deadlines assumed by a contract.

The Arbitration Gap

A Finance Ministry office memorandum of June 2024 directed that government contracts would no longer refer disputes above Rs 10 crore to arbitration (independent dispute resolution outside the courts). MoRTH implemented this through a circular on January 12, 2026, covering BOT, HAM, and EPC concession agreements.

On an Rs 18,884 crore project, this is not a minor procedural point. Claims over force majeure clauses, scope changes, or construction start-date extensions routinely run into hundreds of crores. Without arbitration, the only recourse is the civil courts: slower, costlier, with no guarantee of resolution within the concession period.

The NHBF wrote to Road Transport Secretary V Umashankar and to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on January 17, 2026, warning the change would discourage fresh investment, inflate project costs, and shift risk onto lenders.

The practical consequence runs deeper than that. IRB Infrastructure’s concession structure includes termination payments of up to 150% of equity and 100% of debt, provisions designed to give banks a guaranteed minimum recovery. Without a working arbitration process to enforce them, bonds cannot be rated, credit committees will not approve financing, and equity investors will walk away before the bidding room opens.

The Consequences of Impossible Timelines

The scenario worse than zero bids is a project that attracts a bid on unworkable terms and delivers a road that should not have been built on that schedule. The evidence that this is not theoretical already exists on the Amritsar–Jamnagar Economic Corridor in Gujarat — one of the same corridors whose packages are now being offered under BOT.

In June 2025, visuals of pavement failure on the Sanchore–Santalpur section (Package 4) of NH–754K circulated widely on social media. Pavement distress had appeared across approximately 2.7 km of the six-lane corridor.

NHAI’s Chairman convened an emergency meeting. The contractor, CDS Infra Projects, was suspended from current and future bids and issued a show-cause notice for a monetary penalty of Rs 2.8 crore and possible debarment of up to a year. The project director was placed under suspension for lack of oversight.

It was not an isolated incident: Gadkari told the Rajya Sabha that 55 cases of structural damage or collapse had occurred on NHAI projects in the five years to 2025, with disciplinary action against government officials taken in only two of those cases. Compressed delivery schedules make quality shortcuts rational for a contractor whose margin is already thin. The penalty, when it comes, is probably smaller than the cost of doing it right.

What Needs to Change

The BOT revival might be a legitimate policy objective: a developer carrying traffic risk has commercial reasons to improve road quality, maintain feeder connectivity, and lobby for better access. These are outcomes that HAM, with its government-guaranteed payments, does not produce.

But the revival requires honest contract terms.

Completion timelines must be built from the ground up, not handed down as targets. G R Infraprojects expects the revised MCA to offer a better risk-reward balance, but those are necessary but not sufficient.

The Delhi–Mumbai Expressway has slipped three successive deadlines. If an objective assessment of a 200-km greenfield corridor says four years, the concession agreement should say four years. Anchoring the BOT revival to the same timeline logic that has repeatedly failed its flagship project is not a strategy.

The arbitration framework should be restored for highway projects. Disputes above Rs 10 crore are not edge cases; they are routine. The NHBF has requested a sector-specific carve-out from the ban, as well as for the revival of the Vivad se Vishwas II scheme, a settlement mechanism for clearing the existing backlog of unresolved highway disputes. Locked-up capital and management bandwidth across NHAI and MoRTH are compounding the cost of every delay.

Finally, project preparation must be de-risked before a tender is issued. The appointed date, the point at which the construction clock starts, should not begin until land availability exceeds a credible threshold and utility shifting is substantially advanced.

Requiring a concessionaire (the developer holding the contract) to absorb land and clearance risk that the government itself has not resolved will not attract bids.

India’s infrastructure record over the past decade is genuinely impressive. The NHAI has built more national highways in ten years than in the prior fifty, and that record was built on contracts that respected ground realities.

The two-year BOT tender, as currently structured, is not a faster road. It is an invitation to build a slower one, or none at all.