Role of the Indian Construction Industry in Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals of the Country

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript is an interesting and valuable contribution to the understanding of the SDGs’ industrial characteristics. The study goal is encouraging; the scope is acceptable. Language and grammar are correct; the readability of the manuscript is good. The list of references is extensive, and recent items are involved (note: items 88 and 89 may be the same source). The results seem remarkable to the audience. At the same time, scientific soundness should be improved; the text cannot be considered scientific work in its present form.

Tables summarize the main message of the analysis, but study text often does not give a sense of justification or background to the tables. In addition, tables and figures lack references. Many methodological and calculation details are presented for particular results. Cluster analysis is presented, but ‘how’ is missing. According to the initiatives or challenges sections, the grouping and selection criteria are not presented. I had the impression, reading two different articles taken together. Once, a scientific background analysis, then the opinion of the author.

 

However, I enjoyed and believed the message of the study, I have to request a fundamental review and supplement to improve the scientific justification.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In its current form, the manuscript reads more like a policy report or extended review essay than a research article. The sectional distribution is structurally imbalanced, with a disproportionate amount of space devoted to descriptive exposition and policy-oriented narrative, while foundational scholarly components—particularly methodological detail, analytical interpretation, and integrative conclusion—remain comparatively underdeveloped. This imbalance weakens the manuscript’s academic rigor and suggests a report-style composition rather than a research-driven argument. Substantial restructuring is therefore necessary to achieve appropriate proportionality, analytical depth, and overall scholarly coherence.

 

Although the methodology section claims to employ a “structured research approach,” it is essentially limited to a conventional literature review combined with secondary data compilation, without sufficient methodological transparency or analytical sophistication. The absence of clearly articulated procedures for data selection, validation, and analysis limits reproducibility and undermines confidence in the robustness of the findings.

 

Throughout the manuscript, policy initiatives and statistical figures are frequently presented in a descriptive manner without accompanying critical evaluation. Government programs are listed, adoption figures are reported, and certification counts are cited, yet these elements are rarely analyzed in terms of effectiveness, causal impact, comparative significance, or implementation limitations. As a result, the discussion remains largely informational rather than analytical.

 

Similarly, the paper implies that growth in construction-sector GDP is positively associated with improvements in SDG performance. However, this inference is not supported by rigorous analysis. Correlation alone does not establish causation, and SDG scores are shaped by numerous social, economic, institutional, and environmental variables that extend well beyond the construction sector. Without controls for confounding factors or more sophisticated modeling, such claims remain speculative.

 

The manuscript cites a substantial body of literature, but it does not engage critically with it. There is little discussion of contradictory findings, theoretical debates, competing analytical frameworks, or methodological limitations in prior studies. Effective scholarly synthesis requires not only summarizing sources but also evaluating their assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses, and situating the present study within that intellectual landscape.

 

In addition, several sections reiterate widely known definitions of sustainability and other general concepts that do not materially advance the argument. These passages occupy considerable space yet contribute little analytical value, thereby diluting the paper’s focus and efficiency.

 

The “Way Forward” section exemplifies this pattern. It presents an extensive list of sixteen recommended strategies, but these proposals are not prioritized, comparatively assessed, costed, or evaluated for feasibility, expected impact, or implementation timeframe. The accumulation of recommendations without systematic evaluation reduces their practical and scholarly usefulness, as readers are left without guidance regarding which measures are most critical, realistic, or evidence-based.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I would like to begin by thanking you for a manuscript that is generous in scope and unusually ambitious in its attempt to map the construction sector’s relationship to all 17 SDGs while keeping a clear eye on the Indian national context. The paper reads as a sincere effort to produce a practically useful synthesis, and it contains several ingredients that, with further consolidation, could make it an influential reference point for readers who work at the intersection of sustainability, construction management, and the rapidly expanding ecosystem of SDG assessment tools. In particular, your tables and matrices provide a promising scaffolding for a contribution that could travel well across disciplines, which is important for the journal you target and for your paper’s long-term citational impact.

At the same time, precisely because the manuscript aims to speak to “Standards” as a journal concerned with standardisation, certification, verification, and metrics, I believe the paper will benefit from a clearer sociological and methodological “spine” that foregrounds the role of standards and indicators as governance instruments rather than as contextual background. The journal’s scope explicitly includes ratings, rankings, and metrics as standards of measurement for assessing efficiency, performance, progress, or quality. Your manuscript already relies heavily on SDG indices, dashboards, certification numbers, and classificatory devices (including the high/moderate impact coding in your challenge–SDG matrix). My main suggestion is therefore not to expand the paper’s empirical breadth, but to strengthen its analytical depth by making explicit how these measurement and certification infrastructures work, what assumptions they embed, and how they translate (or fail to translate) sectoral practices into verifiable social and environmental outcomes.

The opening would gain considerable force if it posed a problem that is not only “important” in a general sustainability sense but sociologically sharp in the specific way it frames the construction sector as a fragmented organisational field governed through standards, incentives, and compliance capacities. At present, the Introduction convincingly sets the global SDG horizon, yet it could more directly articulate the tension that makes the manuscript intellectually urgent: construction is simultaneously a major contributor to decarbonisation and urban wellbeing, and a sector where measurement, verification, and accountability are notoriously difficult because supply chains are dispersed, informality is significant, and compliance is uneven across regions and firm sizes. If you explicitly frame this as a standardisation problem—namely, the difficulty of building credible, enforceable, and socially legitimate measurement regimes capable of distinguishing substantive progress from symbolic alignment—you will both strengthen your fit with “Standards” and provide a clearer bridge from your problem statement to your research question and review design. In practical writing terms, you might consider adding, very early, one or two sentences such as: “In construction, SDG alignment is rarely impeded by a lack of declared commitments; it is impeded by the weakness of verification infrastructures: the standards, certification regimes, and performance metrics that would allow claims to be audited, compared, and enforced across heterogeneous projects and jurisdictions.” This would make your subsequent focus on indices, dashboards, and certification counts feel analytically necessary rather than merely descriptive.

Relatedly, the link between problematisation and research question should be made more explicit and slightly more disciplined. Many readers will ask whether the manuscript is primarily a descriptive review of practices, a diagnostic of India’s SDG performance, or an evaluative account of which interventions matter most. I would encourage you to formulate one compact research question (or a small set of tightly coupled questions) and then to align the paper’s structure to it. For example, if the paper’s central question is “how can India’s construction sector credibly advance SDG progress?”, then “credibly” needs to be operationalised through standards, verification, and measurement. If, instead, the question is “what are the sector’s major bottlenecks and solutions?”, then the matrices that assign “high” versus “moderate” SDG impacts require an explicit coding logic (and, ideally, a modest reliability or robustness check) so that the reader understands the epistemic status of those assignments.

The Methodology section is the place where the paper can most decisively increase its scholarly authority. Because the manuscript is a review article, the key expectation is transparency about search strategy, inclusion criteria, and synthesis method. At the moment, the review approach reads as knowledgeable and well-intentioned, but it remains too implicit for a top-quality review: it is not clear which databases were searched, which keywords were used, what the time window was, how many studies were screened, and by what criteria items were included or excluded. Even a concise scoping-review protocol would materially strengthen the paper and reduce vulnerability to the critique that the synthesis might reflect “availability” rather than systematic coverage. I would strongly recommend adopting a lightweight PRISMA-style flow narrative (even if you do not aim for a fully systematic review), specifying your corpus size, and clarifying the logic by which you moved from literature and documents to the classificatory outputs in your tables. This is not bureaucratic overhead; in a standards-oriented journal, it is a substantive part of demonstrating that your synthesis is itself produced by a transparent and reproducible “standard of review”.

This brings me to the manuscript’s use of quantitative indicators and the causal language occasionally attached to them. Your Figure 5 is an excellent illustration of a pattern that deserves attention, yet it is also where the paper currently exposes itself to avoidable methodological criticism. A fitted linear relationship between an SDG score and a sectoral GDP indicator, especially on a small number of annual observations, should be presented as an association or co-movement unless you also articulate (and defend) the assumptions under which a causal reading could be justified. The decision to exclude a year as an outlier is not necessarily wrong, but it requires an explicit rule: was the year excluded based on a pre-specified statistical criterion (e.g., Cook’s distance, leverage thresholds, robust regression diagnostics), or because contextual events make it non-comparable? Without that clarification, a sceptical reader may interpret the exclusion as post-hoc “model cleaning”. More importantly, even if the association is robust, multiple causal stories remain plausible: SDG progress could influence sectoral investment climates; macroeconomic cycles could drive both variables; policy reforms could affect both sector output and SDG-related indicators; and exogenous shocks could distort both. I would therefore encourage you to introduce a simple formal apparatus, as is common in contemporary sociological writing when causal claims are even lightly implied. Concretely, a small causal graph (a directed acyclic graph) could clarify what you treat as the exposure, the outcome, the confounders, and the mediators; alternatively, a compact regression equation accompanied by a paragraph spelling out conditional-independence assumptions would already be a major improvement. For instance, if you keep the figure, you might add a methodological note clarifying that the figure is illustrative, and that causal inference would require assumptions such as no omitted confounding and a temporally plausible lag structure (e.g., construction-sector changes at time t affecting SDG outcomes at time t+1 or t+2). This kind of explicitness will not “penalise” your manuscript; it will strengthen it by showing that you understand the inferential boundaries of your evidence.

In a similar spirit, the challenge–SDG matrix (Figure 6) is potentially one of your most cited elements, because it offers readers a compact “map” they can reuse. Yet the matrix will only carry authority if you explain how “high” versus “moderate” impacts were determined. Was this a judgement grounded in repeated findings across the literature, a structured expert elicitation, a Delphi-style scoring, or a conceptual argument? Here, I would explicitly recommend deepening your engagement with the existing benchmark literature you already cite but do not yet fully mobilise. Barbosa Júnior, Macêdo, and Martins (2023) provide an especially relevant comparator because they systematically assess sustainable practices across the SDGs and employ explicit analytical techniques rather than impressionistic mapping; positioning your Indian-context contribution in relation to that benchmark would sharpen your claim that national context matters and would raise the methodological credibility of your matrices. Opoku, Ahmed, and Ofori (2022) offer a conceptual architecture around organisational learning and resource management that fits remarkably well with your repeated emphasis on training, capacity building, and adoption barriers, yet the framework remains implicit in your current narrative; making it explicit would convert parts of your “Way Forward” from a persuasive list of recommendations into a theoretically anchored argument about learning, routines, and organisational change. Hasan, Işık, and Demirdöğen (2024) are directly relevant to your discussion of lean construction: they do not merely recommend lean practices but identify how and where lean principles relate to specific SDGs through a structured methodology; drawing on their approach would help you differentiate which SDGs lean construction plausibly supports and which claims risk being overstated. Johnsson et al. (2020) are indispensable for a journal like “Standards” because they foreground the problem your manuscript currently touches only lightly: SDG assessments in industry can slide into greenwashing when measurement and accountability are weak; integrating their framing would allow you to treat certification counts and “green building footprints” more critically, not to undermine India’s efforts, but to strengthen your argument by showing you can distinguish symbolic progress from verified performance. Finally, Regona et al. (2024) provide a systematic mapping of the AI–SDG nexus in construction; this is precisely what you need if you want your discussion of AI and BIM to read as a structured transition pathway rather than as a brief gesture towards “smart technologies”.

I would also encourage you to strengthen the sociological register that is currently present but somewhat under-articulated. Many of your identified challenges—regional unevenness, unplanned construction, enforcement gaps, informality, and labour-market vulnerabilities—are not merely technical obstacles; they are manifestations of governance capacity, institutional continuity, and uneven citizenship. If you frame them through the lens of how standards are implemented (and resisted) across heterogeneous territorial and organisational settings, you will create a much clearer bridge between construction management and the sociology of the state. In that regard, it could be extremely fruitful to add a short section that treats “standards and incentives” as policy instruments whose effects depend on design and political economy rather than on their nominal intent. A useful reference here is the paper “Regulation by Incentives, Regulation of the Incentives in Urban Policies” DOI: 10.5148/tncr.2010.1044, which explicitly theorises regulation by incentives and the need to regulate the incentives themselves to avoid capture, perverse effects, or symbolic compliance. This is closely aligned with your own recommendations about tender weightage, subsidies, and fiscal support; citing such work would encourage you to move from “what should be done” to “under what incentive architectures and enforcement conditions will these interventions plausibly work”.

Similarly, your manuscript’s treatment of inequality-related SDGs (notably SDG 10 and SDG 11) would gain depth if you briefly confronted the sociological evidence that infrastructure investment, absent redistributive design and sustained governance capacity, can reproduce spatial inequality. A compact way to do this—without derailing your construction-sector focus—would be to refer to the influential City Divide: Fighting Urban Inequalities (2024) on urban inequalities and the non-destiny of extreme inequality in cities, using it to motivate why standards and performance metrics in construction must be evaluated not only on environmental outputs but also on distributional consequences. If you wish to go one step further, and you discuss informality and unplanned settlements as key obstacles, then bringing in evidence on governance discontinuity in marginal settlements can help you qualify overly optimistic assumptions about multi-level coordination: Midulla, and Stasolla (2026; in Habitat International) show precisely how the lack of durable governance arrangements undermines sustained interventions in marginal urban contexts, which is directly relevant to your challenges on uneven demand, unplanned construction, and retrofitting pathways. The point is not to import a different empirical field, but to strengthen your governance reasoning: many of your “Way Forward” proposals presuppose institutional continuity and coordination that, in comparable urban contexts, is empirically fragile.

To maximise the manuscript’s contribution to “Standards”, I would finally recommend a stronger and more explicit section on verification, certification, and accountability. At present, the paper reports certification numbers and initiatives, but it rarely asks the questions that a standards-oriented readership expects: what precisely is being certified, by whom, with what audit frequency, with what sanctions for non-compliance, and with what susceptibility to strategic gaming? Even a short, focused paragraph on verification mechanisms—possibly anchored in the greenwashing risk highlighted by Johnsson et al. (2020)—would considerably enhance the paper’s analytical credibility and would make it more clearly a paper about standards rather than a broad sustainability overview.

The Conclusion is promising in its desire to speak beyond the Indian case, yet it could do more to elevate the argument to a generalisable proposition: namely, that SDG progress in construction depends less on the existence of sustainability agendas than on the institutional architecture that makes those agendas measurable, comparable, and enforceable through standards, metrics, and incentive designs. If you re-state your main claims in those terms, and if you explicitly delimit what your evidence can and cannot support causally, the manuscript will be both more robust and more citable.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors gave a detailed response to the critical comments formulated in the first review round. I maintain my opinion about the benefits and opportunities of the study. They addressed the problems and complemented the manuscript. The scientific soundness is now improved. I have no further requests for the authors.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author have improved the paper

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I have read the revised manuscript and the authors' detailed response to all eleven comments with considerable attention. The revision represents a substantial and disciplined effort: the authors have engaged seriously with each point, strengthened the methodological transparency of the review, introduced an appropriate causal qualification around Figure 5, added a dedicated section on verification and accountability, and enriched the governance reasoning in the conclusion. I am satisfied that the manuscript has been considerably improved and that the authors have demonstrated both the willingness and the capacity to meet a demanding revision round. I believe the paper, in this revised form, has real potential to become a reference point at the intersection of SDG assessment, construction management, and standards-oriented scholarship.