India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) announced the third round of its forward-looking survey of private corporate capital expenditure intentions, CAPEX 2026, on 1 October 2026. The National Statistics Office (NSO) will conduct the survey from October through December 2026. The announcement is not a release of new investment totals or realized spending. It sets out a data-collection round that will gather information on recent expenditure, provisional expenditure in the current financial year and investment intentions for the following financial year. CAPEX 2026 is therefore news about the start and design of a survey, not evidence that planned projects have already been funded or completed.

The survey covers selected large private-sector enterprises that are active in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs register and meet prescribed eligibility and turnover criteria. NSO says the survey frame is prepared using the ministry’s registration information. Respondents will compile and submit their answers through a dedicated secure web portal, which offers questionnaire guidance, definitions, an instruction manual and a video guide. This is not a census of every publicly registered company. The announcement does not state the sample size for CAPEX 2026, expected response rate, weighting scheme or estimator. The exercise is conducted under India’s Collection of Statistics Act, 2008.

The 1 October release also summarizes results from the two earlier rounds, which must be kept separate from the forthcoming CAPEX 2026 findings. The inaugural CAPEX 2024 survey ran from November 2024 to January 2025. For aggregate expenditure in financial year 2024–25, manufacturing represented 43.80%, information and communication 15.60%, and transportation and storage 14.00%. The second round, CAPEX 2025, was conducted from October to December 2025. In its provisional aggregate capital expenditure for financial year 2025–26, manufacturing accounted for 50.17%, with expenditure reported at ₹573,900 crore.

For the same provisional CAPEX 2025 aggregate, the release gives information and communication a 16.38% share and ₹187,395 crore; electricity, gas, steam and air-conditioning supply 8.96% and ₹102,448 crore; and transportation and storage 5.55% and ₹63,517 crore. These are category amounts for the provisional spending aggregate in the CAPEX 2025 round. The release also reports how surveyed enterprises described intended robotics allocation: 21.16% planned to devote more than 80% of their total CAPEX to robotics, while 78.84% said robotics would receive less than 20% of their total CAPEX. Those percentages describe respondents’ plans, not realized robotics spending or robotics’ realized share of national investment.

For the fixed panel of 3,819 enterprises, the prior survey put actual capital expenditure in 2024–25 at an average of ₹173.5 crore per enterprise. NSO reported an overall realization ratio of 96.3% for the panel, saying actual expenditure was broadly in line with investment intentions at the aggregate level. That finding should not automatically be generalized to all private companies in India. The announcement does not claim that the panel represents every business by size or industry, and the estimate reflects aggregated answers from selected participating enterprises.

The CAPEX 2026 questionnaire will cover past, current and future expenditure; asset groups; industries; investment strategies; and financing sources. It will ask about investment in green energy and robotics and the purpose of spending, including capacity expansion or upgrading. MoSPI says unit-level company data will not be disseminated and that disclosure controls will protect information that could identify an enterprise in aggregate results. This confidentiality supports respondent protection, while also meaning outside researchers will not be able to reproduce the estimates from company-level microdata. The ministry says the quality of the results depends on coverage and timely responses, and has asked selected enterprises to submit complete and accurate information.

The clearest comparison in the announcement is the manufacturing share in the previous surveys: 43.80% of aggregate expenditure in 2024–25 in CAPEX 2024 and 50.17% of the provisional 2025–26 aggregate in CAPEX 2025. The difference should not be treated as a definitive measure of investment momentum without reviewing sector composition, coverage and estimation details for both rounds. The 2025–26 figure is explicitly provisional, while the CAPEX 2026 round is only beginning to collect data. The survey is designed to track intentions alongside past spending, but an intention is not a financed commitment or a project under construction. When results from the new round are released, readers will need to distinguish reference years, panel coverage and whether figures are provisional or actual.