‘PPPs need to build system-level markets over transactions’

India’s public-private partnership (PPP) framework needs to move from transaction-centric execution toward system-level market building, with a sharper focus on reducing structural uncertainty, the Economic Survey 2025-26 suggested on Thursday.

The pre-Budget document tabled in Parliament further said that this requires clearer sectoral pipelines with multi-year visibility, a tighter linkage between national programmes and bankable project preparation, as well as disciplined pre-construction risk closure by the public authority.The Survey noted that PPP outcomes have been weakest where land acquisition, statutory clearances, demand assessment, or utility shifting have remained unresolved.

In the coming decade, it said a credible PPP regime will be defined less by risk transfer on paper and more by the State’s capacity to absorb early-stage risks that private capital cannot efficiently price.“Accordingly, India’s PPP framework needs to move from transaction-centric execution toward system-level market building, with a sharper focus on reducing structural uncertainty,” the Survey said.

While PPP frameworks have matured at the central level and in select sectors, the pre-Budget document said challenges persist at the sub-national level.“The distinction between PPPs and Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) contracts-namely that PPPs are partnerships rather than vendor arrangements-is not always fully understood,” it said.The Survey noted that trust deficits and a limited understanding of risk”reward principles continue to constrain the uptake of PPPs in several states andurban local bodies. These challenges are compounded by uneven institutional capacity, even as states and cities account for a rising share of infrastructure demand, it said.

The Survey said the next reform frontier lies in professionalising PPP cells, adopting programmatic approaches instead of project-by-project experimentation, and leveraging data platforms to track performance, renegotiation, and lifecycle outcomes.Referring to the highways sector, the Survey said to align freight speeds with global benchmarks, the High-Speed Corridor (HSC) network expanded from 550 km in 2014 to 5,364 km by December 2025.