Source: PARIVESH 2.0 open API (advanceSearchData?majorClearanceType=1), full EC register. 56 raw PARIVESH status values consolidated into canonical process stages. "Delisted" is the system's auto-cleanup of inactive applications. Grant rate = granted ÷ decided. Not approved (6,954) + EC granted (54,406) sums to 61,360, one short of the 61,361 "reached a decision" total shown above — a ±1 rounding artifact in the source consolidation.

Where the funnel actually loses proposals

Two of the funnel's stages account for almost the entire gap between 113,970 filed and 54,406 granted, and neither one is the applicant getting turned down. Auto-delisting removes 25,061 proposals (22% of everything filed) before they ever reach a substantive review — PARIVESH's own system flags an application as inactive, typically because the proponent stopped responding to a query or let a procedural deadline lapse, and closes it administratively. That is a process failure on the applicant's side, not an environmental judgement on the project. Pipeline backlog is the second big loss: of the 88,909 live applications, 27,548 (31%) are still sitting in one of the three review stages — Terms of Reference (15,869), screening (7,197) or appraisal (4,482) — simply waiting their turn, neither approved nor rejected. Add auto-delisting and backlog together and they account for roughly 46% of everything filed; genuine rejection, by contrast, is a rounding error on the total — just 2,553 of 113,970 proposals (2.2%).

That pattern reframes what "88.7% grant rate" actually measures. It is not the odds a random new proposal has of being approved — it's the odds a proposal has of being approved once it survives long enough to reach a decision at all. The binding constraint on India's EC pipeline, on this data, is administrative throughput and applicant follow-through, not environmental scrutiny turning projects away. A reader using EC data to judge how permissive or restrictive India's clearance regime is should weight the auto-delisting and backlog numbers at least as heavily as the 88.7% headline — a system that clears almost everything it finishes reviewing, but takes a long time to finish reviewing a third of what's in front of it and administratively drops a fifth of what's filed, is a different story than either "clearances are a rubber stamp" or "clearances are a bottleneck" told on its own.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.