“India is caught in a dilemma where you have to lift the poor out of poverty, but while doing that you have to protect both the social and environmental aftereffects,” said a senior Finance Ministry official, who was not authorized to speak for the ministry. “It got to the point where numerous projects were mired in red tape and a potential investor in infrastructure was unclear when he would get his clearances.”

Since July, a committee started by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has given fast-track regulatory approval to 125 previously stalled infrastructure and manufacturing projects worth $64 billion, but that is still considered inadequate. “This is not a solution for the industry’s problems. This is an exercise in crisis management,” said Madhu Terdal, chief financial officer of GMR Infrastructure, a Bangalore-based builder of airports, energy projects, highways and urban infrastructure.

The state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, gave the Mumbai bridge project the green light in 1996. But environmental clearance from the central government — the last of the regulatory approvals required — came only in October 2012.

Over those years, India’s economy has gone from a boom to a slowdown, and potential builders are now less than eager to sign on. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority has opened the project for bidding as a public-private partnership three times since 2008, each time failing to elicit adequate response from private companies.

In such a partnership, the builder would collect tolls to recover costs and make a profit. In the most recent tender, last August, construction companies pointed to reduced traffic forecasts stemming from the economic slowdown and delays in building an airport for Navi Mumbai, affecting the projected revenue from toll collections.

Since 2005, the estimated cost of the project has more than doubled, from $632 million. Now, the state government is considering using a cash contract — in which the project is funded entirely by the government but built by a private contractor — and is looking to raise debt from foreign funding agencies. While the official estimate for completion is 2019, further delays are widely expected.

Over the last year, economic malaise, slowing demand and rising interest rates have put infrastructure companies in a financial bind, and this has increased the difficulty in finding a contractor for the bridge. “Despite the fact that we had substantially de-risked the project when we restructured it, the private sector failed to respond because most of the Indian companies that we had shortlisted were facing their own financial issues,” said Ashwini Bhide, who oversees the bridge project and other infrastructure programs at the Mumbai development authority.