Ask anyone who has actually delivered a large infrastructure or technology project what caused the worst delay, and engineering is rarely the answer. It is usually an approval that didn't come on schedule, a procurement process nobody mapped in advance, or a regulation that changed underneath a project already underway. This is such a common failure mode, in India and in Europe alike, that it barely counts as a controversial claim.
Policy risk is treated as something that happens to a project
The instinct on most delivery teams is to treat policy and regulatory risk as external — something to react to when it surfaces, rather than something to plan for from the start. By the time that risk becomes visible, in a stalled permit or a procurement challenge, it is usually too late to address cheaply. The fix at that point is expensive, political, and slow. The fix earlier is a conversation that should have happened before the budget was committed.
What alignment actually means
Our Public Policy pillar exists to do that work from the start rather than as remediation: reading a technology's deployment plan against the rules that will actually govern it, working within the procurement, accessibility and accountability constraints that public-sector timelines carry and private timelines mostly don't, and doing the practical, unglamorous work of getting government, industry and research counterparts who don't normally talk to each other into the same agreement.
A reference model, not a template
Europe's public-sector procurement and permitting processes are, on the whole, more mature and more thoroughly documented than India's equivalents — not because European institutions are inherently better run, but because they have simply had longer to formalise under pressure. That maturity is worth studying closely and adapting deliberately into how policy engagement gets structured here. It is not something to copy wholesale; regulatory environments that took decades to build in one country rarely transplant cleanly into another. But understanding how they got there is useful, and mostly unused outside the institutions that built it.
Why this sits next to the other pillars
Public Policy is deliberately positioned next to Infrastructure and International Partnerships in how we work, because the same coordination problem — getting government, industry and research counterparts into agreement before resources or credibility are spent — shows up in nearly every cross-border project we take on, regardless of which pillar first brought us into it.
Related: Public Policy, Industries.