How long a public project in Nepal actually takes
Building a dataset of time spent at each stage of the public project cycle, from conception to construction.
Everyone in Nepal’s infrastructure sector agrees that projects take too long. Almost nobody can say where the time goes, because the question is usually answered with anecdotes about whichever stage the speaker happens to sit in.
I am building the boring version of the answer: a record of dates for each stage of the cycle.
What is being measured
For each project in the sample:
- Conception to inclusion in a plan or budget line
- Feasibility study commissioned to feasibility study accepted
- Statutory clearances applied for to clearances issued
- Clearance to procurement notice
- Procurement notice to contract award
- Award to mobilisation
The interesting quantity is not the duration of each stage. It is the gap between the end of one stage and the start of the next, time in which nothing is being done and no one is accountable for the delay, because no stage owns it.
Early impression
The waiting dominates. A feasibility study that takes four months of work can sit for a year before anything is commissioned off the back of it. If that holds across a larger sample, then the reforms most often proposed (faster reviews, shorter approval windows) are aimed at the smaller half of the problem.
I want to be careful here: the sample is not yet large enough to publish a number, and selection bias is a real risk because completed projects are easier to trace than abandoned ones. Treat the above as a hypothesis I am trying to break.
Status
Data collection ongoing. If you work on public projects and would be willing to share stage dates, please get in touch.