When Sauce for the Goose is not Sauce for the Gander—The divergent impact of transparency law in infrastructure procurement: evidence from EPC and PPP road projects in India

Transparency in procurement, especially for large capital investments like infrastructure projects, is essential for enhancing accountability and performance. In the infrastructure sector, two procurement models are prevalent: the traditional Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) model of public procurement and the more modern long-term Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model. This study examines the impacts of India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act, a landmark transparency law enacted in 2005, on project performance under these models. Using data from 481 EPC and 510 PPP highway projects implemented between 2000 and 2019, we apply a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) methodology to identify causal impacts. A key innovation of our approach involves alternating treatment and control groups across time periods to enhance robustness by mitigating period-specific and model-specific biases. Findings reveal a divergence: while the transparency law reduced construction time in EPC projects, it increased costs in PPP projects. This suggests that transparency laws may improve efficiency in EPC, which has fewer built-in accountability mechanisms but imposes compliance burdens on PPP projects that already have performance incentives through bundled contracts with key performance indicators. For policymakers, the study highlights the need for context-specific governance strategies and draws attention to the trade-offs between transparency and efficiency in infrastructure procurement.