Capex by 60 CPSEs, govt organisations touch 73.6% of targets in April-December

Data showed that the target of capital expenditure for 60 CPSEs, including four organisations from 18 central ministries and departments, was around ₹7.85 lakh crore.

Capital Expenditure by Central Public Sector Enterprises and four government organisations has touched around 74 per cent at the end of December, data from Public Enterprises Department of Finance Ministry showed. Officials expect that if the trend persists, the year-end target will be exceeded.

Data showed that the target of capital expenditure for 60 CPSEs, including four organisations from 18 central ministries and departments, was around ₹7.85 lakh crore. Against this, these entities spent over ₹5.77 lakh crore during the April-December period, which is around 74 per cent of target. However, the growth as compared to the corresponding period of the last fiscal, was just 1.3 per cent. In the last fiscal, these entities achieved 102 per cent of the target and officials expect that same for the current year too.

December saw expenditure of over ₹72000 crore, which is the highest in three months of the current fiscal and the second highest in the current fiscal. It is Important to note here that one government organisation and three CPSEs exceeded their annual targets by December itself. Dedicated Freight Corridor was at the top, having spent over 450 per cent of its annual target. This was followed by NLC (formerly Neyveli Lignite Corporation), NTPC and Hindustan Petroleum.  Mean­while, the Rail­way Board and NHAI spent around 74 per cent and 79 per cent of their respect­ive tar­gets.

Prof­it­able growth

CPSEs are encour­aged to take up capex to achieve prof­it­able growth in their busi­ness. A large capex cre­ates growth oppor­tun­it­ies and fur­ther employ­ment. Sev­eral key per­form­ance indic­at­ors (KPIs) have been included in the annual MoU frame­work for CPSE eval­u­ation. This includes capex, return on net­worth or return on cap­ital employed, export and import as per cent of rev­enue, EBIDTA as per cent of rev­enue and asset turnover ratio.

This data has come at a time when capex of the Cent­ral gov­ern­ment surged by over 28 per cent during April-November period of FY26 compared to the corresponding period of FY25, as reported by Controller General of Accounts9 CGA). Key contributions came from Railway (71 per cent of the Budget Estimates), Road (65 per cent of the Budget Estimates) and Capital Outlay on Defence Services (62 per cent of the Budget Estimates), besides others.

The Budget provided over ₹11.21 lakh crore for FY26 cap­ital expendit­ure, of which over ₹6.58 lakh crore has been spent during April-November period.  Higher spend­ing by infra­struc­ture min­is­tries is expec­ted to have a pos­it­ive impact on the over­all growth num­ber.

Higher spend­ing by CPSEs and gov­ern­ment organ­isa­tions are crit­ical as not much improve­ment is seen in the private capex. It may be noted that a for­ward­ look­ing sur­vey on private capex invest­ment inten­tions by the Min­istry of Stat­ist­ics and Pro­gramme Imple­ment­a­tion indic­ated around 25 per cent decline in inten­ded private capex in FY26 to ₹4.88 lakh crore as against ₹6.56 lakh crore in FY25.

Published on January 8, 2026