Digitalisation is fast emerging as a critical lever for improving efficiency, transparency and productivity across India’s infrastructure sectors. As project scale and complexity increase, contractors are increasingly adopting digital tools for planning, monitoring and execution, even as legacy processes and fragmented workflows continue to dominate large parts of the sector. Technologies such as building information modelling (BIM), drone-based surveying, real-time project monitoring dashboards and mobile-based reporting are gradually finding their way on to construction sites, offering the potential to reduce delays, improve cost control and enhance quality assurance. At the same time, adoption remains uneven, constrained by factors such as workforce readiness, capital costs, interoperability issues and the absence of standardised digital protocols across projects. Along these lines, the growing integration of digitalisation is changing the approach to project execution. Contractors share their views on the current digitalisation trends shaping infrastructure development, recent milestones, the barriers to adoption and the future outlook…
How would you assess the current levels of digitalisation in infrastructure construction?
Sandeep Desai
The infrastructure construction industry has moved well beyond basic computerisation and is now entering a phase of integrated digital transformation. Over the past decade, organisations have adopted enterprise systems, digital engineering platforms, project management tools and mobile technologies that have significantly improved visibility, collaboration and control. However, the level of digital maturity varies greatly across companies and projects. Large engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) organisations are increasingly embracing digital technologies, while many medium-sized contractors continue to rely on spreadsheets, manual reporting and fragmented systems. In leading infrastructure organisations, digitalisation today spans the full project life cycle, from tendering and design to construction, commissioning and asset management. Technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, BIM, primavera-based project scheduling, digital procurement systems, engineering design tools, construction productivity applications and analytics platforms are becoming mainstream. A number of firms are also experimenting with AI-based forecasting, predictive maintenance, drone-based monitoring and digital safety systems. However, the industry remains less digitalised than sectors such as banking, telecommunications and manufacturing. Construction projects are geographically dispersed, involve multiple stakeholders and often operate in challenging environments. Consequently, a significant amount of project information still resides in email trails, spreadsheets and individual knowledge repositories. The next stage of digitalisation will therefore be about connecting data across systems and creating a truly integrated digital enterprise.
Ashok Kumar
The construction industry contributes nearly 13 per cent to global GDP, and employs 10 per cent of the total workforce. The sector faces multiple legacy issues including manpower shortages and cost and time overruns. Even with these challenges, the adoption of technology and digital solutions is the second lowest across all industries (lowest being agriculture) as per a McKinsey survey. For bigger India infrastructure players, the adoption of data analytics, mobile apps, internet of things (IoT)-based technology and cloud-based construction software has reached 65-70 per cent in the past four to five years, while medium to smaller players are still lagging behind. The adoption of digital technology is greater in non-linear projects such as buildings and factories compared to linear ones like transmission lines.
What are the most common digital solutions/technologies being used? What has been the experience so far, and what benefits have been derived?
Sandeep Desai
The benefits have been substantial. Organisations have reported improvements in project visibility, better costs and schedule control, faster decision-making, enhanced engineering coordination, improved safety performance and higher operational efficiency. Digital tools have also strengthened governance by providing auditable, data-driven processes across geographically dispersed projects.
Ashok Kumar
We are witnessing an increasing number of companies adopting digital solutions across the value-chain to make it a success story. Infrastructure projects typically have three key work scopes – engineering, procurement and construction (EPC). These are supported by multiple functions including – health, safety and environment (HSE), plant and machinery, formworks, quality assurance, stores, contracts and claims management, etc.
The most common digital/technology solutions for engineering include engineering document management systems and progress trackers; drone and geographic information system (GIS) technology to get accurate ground truth; and BIM and digital twins to simulate construction, clash detection, construction scenario planning, progress monitoring, etc. Solutions for procurement include e-procurement platforms that streamline purchase requisition and purchase orders, e-auction platforms and AI-based commodity price tracking. For construction planning, planning tools are employed as per the project type. For single-location projects such as substations, MSP and Primavera P6 are used, and for linear projects such as roads and railways, TILOS is deployed. Additionally, digital twins are being deployed to simulate construction scenarios before on-ground execution.
Mobile applications for capturing and recording construction progress, automated daily progress reports, and computer vision-based solutions are used for progress monitoring. For plant and machinery asset monitoring, IoT-based GPS/fuel monitoring sensors enable fuel consumption monitoring and equipment utilisation, while predictive maintenance solutions and load sensors help monitor asset productivity in construction equipment. Further, weighbridges are being digitalised and remotely monitored.
Worker attendance is enabled through geofencing technology and facial recognition, while GPS/RFID-enabled helmets help track workforce movement. Under material management, QR codes are being used to track materials within the project store. In the area of HSE, virtual reality is deployed for safety and safe work method training, while computer vision is used for safety compliance monitoring and detecting fire incidents. For quality assurance, dedicated applications support quality management and non-compliance reporting, while computer vision is used for quality inspection of transmission line towers. Overall project monitoring is strengthened through management reporting and dashboards, with analytics spanning EPC and finance and supported by automated insights.
The benefits have been many. The analytics platform based on data lake ensures a single version of truth and provides automated actionable insights for decision-making. Further, digitalisation drives an overall cultural change, with a greater focus on data-driven decision-making. In addition to intangible benefits, digitalisation delivers results in multiple measurable areas: project completion time down 8-10 per cent; overhead cost down by 5-7 per cent; number of workers reduced by 8-10 per cent; fuel cost reduced by 8-10 per cent (fuel pilferage); material pilferage down/better reconciliation; improved asset utilisation; and reduction in safety incidences.
What are the key barriers to adoption?
Sandeep Desai
Despite growing awareness of digital transformation, several barriers continue to slow adoption. The first challenge is fragmented data and siloed systems. Many organisations use multiple applications developed over the years without a unified data architecture. Valuable information is often scattered across ERP systems, project planning platforms, spreadsheets and email repositories. The second barrier is change management. Infrastructure construction remains a people-intensive industry, and site personnel, engineers and project managers may be comfortable with established ways of working. They therefore require substantial support, training and leadership commitment to embrace new technologies. The third challenge is the shortage of digital skills. The industry increasingly requires professionals who understand both engineering and digital technologies such as data analytics, AI, cloud platforms and cybersecurity. Such talent remains scarce. Cybersecurity and data privacy are also emerging concerns. As organisations become more connected and cloud-based, protecting project information, operational systems and personal data is becoming increasingly important. Regulatory developments such as data privacy legislation are encouraging companies to strengthen their governance frameworks. Finally, business cases for advanced technologies are not always straightforward. Construction projects face strong commercial pressures, making it difficult to justify investments unless clear productivity, quality or risk reduction benefits can be demonstrated.
Ashok Kumar
The sector remains heavily dependent on manual processes, fragmented communications and legacy methodologies. Key challenges in digital adoption in the sector are a large geographical spread with low or no network, a non-tech-savvy workforce and ever-shifting project locations (more so for linear projects), high worker churn rate, training difficulty, and reliance on conventional data sources and tools. As per estimates by Gartner and BCG, more than 50 per cent of digitalisation projects do not meet their stated objectives.
Several business challenges hinder adoption, including business processes that are not digitally ready, the force-fitting of available digital solutions and the implementation of multiple digital solutions in isolation without adequate integration. From a strategic alignment perspective, organisations often lack a clear business case demonstrating how digitalisation will benefit the business and generate a return on investment.
Other challenges include the absence of a digital road map, limited buy-in from top management and constraints related to capital investment. Resistance to change also poses a significant barrier, with organisations facing cultural challenges and stakeholder resistance, particularly among those who may be uncomfortable with increased transparency. In addition, internal capability gaps can impede progress, including the lack of skilled and knowledgeable team members to drive digitalisation initiatives, as well as insufficient on-ground training and handholding to support adoption.
“Digitalisation drives an overall cultural change, with a greater focus on data-driven decisionmaking.” Ashok Kumar
What are the emerging requirements? What digital trends are expected to shape the future of the infrastructure construction industry?
Sandeep Desai
The industry is now moving from digitalisation to intelligence. Future success will depend not merely on collecting data but on converting data into actionable insights and enabling autonomous decision support. AI will be one of the most transformative technologies. It will help forecast project delays, optimise schedules, predict safety risks, automate document management, and support engineering decision-making through digital assistants and agentic systems. Digital twins will gain traction. Infrastructure assets will have virtual replicas connected to real-time operational data, enabling continuous monitoring, predictive maintenance and life cycle optimisation. Connected construction will emerge through the integration of BIM, GIS, ERP, internet of things (IoT) and field systems.
Organisations will move towards a “single source of truth” that provides enterprise-wide visibility. Drone and computer vision technologies will play a major role in automated progress tracking, quality verification and safety surveillance. Manual measurements and reporting will gradually give way to automated capture and analytics. Industrial IoT and smart equipment will provide real-time visibility into equipment utilisation, energy consumption, asset performance and workforce productivity. Cybersecurity and data governance will become board-level priorities.
As digital dependency increases, organisations will need stronger resilience frameworks, zero-trust architectures, data protection programmes and regulatory compliance mechanisms. Finally, the future infrastructure enterprise will increasingly leverage cloud platforms, advanced analytics and AI-powered knowledge systems, enabling leaders to make decisions based on real-time enterprise intelligence rather than historical reports.
“Future success will depend not merely on collecting data but on converting data into actionable insights and enabling autonomous decision support.” Sandeep Desai
Ashok Kumar
A key emerging trend is the adoption of AI-enabled tools in infrastructure. As per a report by Mordor, AI in the construction market is projected to grow from $4.96 billion in 2025 to $14.72 billion by 2030 with multiple use cases emerging. AI is redefining infrastructure, using legacy data to model future scenarios and drive operational efficiency in real time.
For strategic bidding, AI tools are used to analyse older bids, simulate traffic and weather conditions and assess project risks to make bids more realistic. In engineering, AI supports design optimisation through scenario analysis and simulations. For procurement, AI enables demand prediction, links procurement with project execution, tracks and predicts supplier performance, and provides market intelligence and commodity price tracking. In construction planning,
AI facilitates a data-driven and dynamic planning process by simulating multiple “what-if” scenarios in real time, predicting schedule delays and optimising resource allocation. Project reviews have also become more dynamic through AI-enabled war rooms, transforming reviews into data-driven decision-making processes. In risk analysis, AI performs near-real-time PESTLE analysis, identifying risks at both the country and state levels.
As per a McKinsey 2023 report, AI-enabled planning reduces project delays by 10-20 per cent and cost overruns by 5-10 per cent. Currently, most of the organisations are adopting integrated intelligence operating systems to pull data from multiple siloed and disparate systems to derive actionable insights. AI has reduced the turnaround time for critical strategy decisions from weeks to hours, without compromising on accuracy.
Looking ahead, the infrastructure industry is moving in the right direction but needs to identify more use cases for AI, and expedite the implementation of digital tools in order to reap benefits.
