Do Sustainability Initiatives Cause Delays and Cost Overruns in Construction?

The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the major causes of construction project delays and cost overruns in terms of sustainability activities which are not extensively covered in the literature and thus appear to be novel. This research identifies eight major factors that contribute to construction project delays in Pune, India, through a survey of the key stakeholders: clients, contractors and consultants. Sustainability initiatives, land scarcity and rising land prices, increase in infrastructure development, project delays and cost overruns, material cost, challenges in recruiting skilled labor, Goods and Services Tax (GST) on real estate sector, regulatory norms, Non-resident Indian (NRI) investments in Pune real estate market are all included. The study evaluated data normality, reliability, and important factors affecting construction costs in Pune, India using Cronbach's Alpha, the Shapiro-Wilk test, the Relative Importance Index (RII), and Spearman Rank Correlation. The RII shows that land scarcity and rising land prices, increased infrastructure development, project delays and cost overruns are evidently the foremost issues requiring corrective action. The sustainability initiatives appears only as the third ranked factor. However, the Spearman's rho, which measures the strength of association between two variables, identified a correlation between sustainability initiatives with ‘project delays and cost overruns’ and challenges in recruiting skilled labor. Further, using regression analysis, the study also assessed how strong this relationship is and found out that sustainability measures have a positive correlation with project delays and cost overruns. Therefore, this study reveals that sustainability initiatives delay project completion and lead to cost overruns, in real estate sector projects.