Capital Efficiency Index.
How hard each rupee of capital actually works — the productivity of India's investment, in one number. The companion to the Capital Formation Index.
Efficiency only means something next to volume. Formation is running 59% above baseline while efficiency sits near it — the trail is drifting right and flat, toward bubble-watch.
100 = mid-2024 efficiency (trailing 3-month average).
Two are inverted — for ICOR and stalled projects, lower is leaner. Latest reads anchor to official 2025 releases.
Incremental capital-output ratio — rupees of investment needed per unit of extra GDP. Lower is leaner. Inverted.
Source ↗ The Core IAS / Vajiram, 2026Profit relative to capital employed across the listed non-financial universe. Higher is better.
Source ↗ Business Standard / Capitaline, Dec 2025Revenue generated per rupee of assets — how busy the capital base is. Higher is better.
Source ↗ Gravitywell estimate (Capitaline aggregate)Share of manufacturing capacity actually in use. Idle plant is idle capital. Higher is better.
Source ↗ RBI OBICUS / CEIC, 2026Share of outstanding project capital stuck and not commissioning. Lower is leaner. Inverted.
Source ↗ CMIE / Business Standard, 2025Inverted where needed, smoothed, rebased, weighted.
Capital intensity (ICOR), corporate RoCE, asset turnover, capacity utilisation, and the stalled-project ratio — the five readouts of whether deployed capital is actually producing.
ICOR and the stalled ratio are 'lower is better' — they are reciprocal-rebased so that leaner capital intensity and fewer stuck projects lift the index, not drag it.
Trailing 3-month average to cut noise, rebase each pillar to 100 at the mid-2024 window, then weight: ICOR 30% · RoCE 25% · turnover 15% · capacity 15% · stalled 15%.
Efficiency only means something next to volume. CEI is designed to be plotted against the Capital Formation Index — the gap between the two is the signal.
High formation + high efficiency = genuine boom. High formation + flat efficiency = bubble watch. The trajectory through the quadrant is the firm's headline macro read.
- · ICOR is noisy quarter-to-quarter — only trailing multi-period readings are used, never a single print.
- · RoCE reports annually with a lag — vintages are stamped and the series interpolated, not invented.
- · Sector-mix shifts can flatter asset turnover — the universe is fixed at period start to keep it honest.
- · Capacity utilisation is manufacturing-only — it proxies, not captures, services-sector efficiency.
Data vintage June 2026. Latest reads anchor to official releases — RBI OBICUS (capacity), CMIE (stalled projects, capex), Capitaline / Business Standard (RoCE), and the ICOR framework (MOSPI/PIB). The within-period monthly distribution is Gravitywell's reconstruction; pillar reads reconcile to the cited primary sources. ICOR and RoCE are inherently low-frequency and are interpolated, not invented — vintages stamped, revisions flagged.
Volume and quality, monthly.
The Capital Efficiency Index and the quadrant call update every month — with the full pillar breakdown.