These two get confused constantly, and the confusion is understandable: they are published by the same department, for the same items, in the same year. But they answer different questions.
The DSR tells you *what an item costs*. The DAR tells you *why*. One is a price list; the other is the working behind every price on it.
The short answer
| DSR | DAR | |
|---|---|---|
| Stands for | Delhi Schedule of Rates | Delhi Analysis of Rates |
| Answers | What is the rate for this item? | How was that rate arrived at? |
| Contains | Item code, full description, unit, rate | Every ingredient of the item — materials, labour, machinery, carriage, sundries — with coefficients and basic rates |
| Length per item | One line | A table, typically 5 to 20 lines |
| Used for | Preparing a BOQ, estimating, tendering, billing at agreement rates | Justifying a rate, pricing an extra or non-schedule item, checking a claim, material planning |
| Changes with | Cost index revisions and correction slips | The basic rates of its ingredients |
One sentence to keep: every DSR rate is the bottom line of a DAR analysis. If you can read the analysis you can reconstruct the rate, and if you can reconstruct the rate you can defend it.
What is in the DSR
The Delhi Schedule of Rates is CPWD's published rate list. Despite the name it is used far beyond Delhi — most central government works and a good number of state and PSU works adopt it, with a cost index applied for the station.
It is published in volumes — Civil, Electrical, and others — each with its own edition year. The current civil edition in common use is DSR Civil 2023; the electrical side runs on DSR Electrical 2025. An agreement adopts a specific edition, and that edition governs for the life of the contract regardless of what is published afterwards.
A DSR entry is deliberately terse: a code, a long and legally precise description, a unit and a rate. The description is doing the heavy lifting — it is what defines the scope of the item, and disputes about whether something is "included in the item" are settled by reading it.
What is in the DAR
The Delhi Analysis of Rates is the working. For each item it lists every ingredient the item consumes per unit of output, the quantity of each (the coefficient), the basic rate applied to it, and the resulting amount — then totals them and adds contractor's profit and overheads to reach the published rate.
A typical analysis has five kinds of line:
- Materials — cement, sand, aggregate, bricks, steel, and so on, with coefficients per unit of finished work.
- Labour — each trade separately, in days: mason, carpenter, blacksmith, coolie, bhisti.
- Machinery and plant — mixers, vibrators, hoists, priced per day or per hour and multiplied by the fraction of a day the item consumes.
- Carriage — lead and lift for materials that need moving. These lines are usually left blank in the published analysis, because lead is station-specific and cannot be published centrally.
- Sub-analysis — where the item consumes another analysed item, such as mortar or concrete, the analysis references that item rather than re-listing its ingredients.
Blank carriage lines are not zero. An analysis reproduced with carriage treated as zero understates the rate, and the difference surfaces later as a claim.
Where the cost index fits
The DSR rate is at the base price level of its edition, for the base station. Applying it anywhere else, or at any later date, means applying a cost index — a percentage that brings the schedule rate to the price level of your station and period.
This is where DSR and DAR pull apart in practice. The cost index moves the DSR rate as a whole. It does not tell you *which* ingredient moved, and it does not help at all when what you need is the rate of an item that is not in the schedule. For that you have to go back to the analysis and rebuild from the ingredients — which is exactly what an NS item rate analysis is.
When you need the DAR rather than the DSR
- Pricing an extra or non-schedule item. No published rate exists, so you build one from the ingredients.
- Justifying a rate to an auditor or a client. "The DSR says so" is not a justification. The analysis is.
- Checking a contractor's claim. Claims usually turn on a coefficient — how much cement, how many mason-days — and only the analysis has those.
- Material planning and indenting. The coefficients are quantities per unit of work, so multiplying them by your BOQ quantities gives a material requirement directly. This is the most common non-financial use, and it is why the coefficient tables are worth having even when the rate is settled.
- Assessing the impact of a price change. If cement has moved 8%, only the analysis tells you what that does to a plaster rate.
A concrete illustration
Take one line of brickwork in cement mortar 1:4. The DSR gives you a single figure per cubic metre and nothing else.
The analysis for the same item gives you: 0.494 thousand bricks, four separate labour trades — mason 1st class, mason 2nd class, coolie and bhisti — a carriage line for the bricks, a sub-analysis line for the mortar it consumes, and a sundries line, each with its own coefficient and rate, adding to a sub-total which then takes 15% for contractor's profit and overheads.
From the DSR line you can price a wall. From the analysis you can also tell the storekeeper how many bricks to order, tell the site engineer how many mason-days to plan for, and tell an auditor precisely why the rate is what it is. The two are not competing — but only one of them survives a question.
You can read the full ingredient list for that item, and dozens of others, on the material coefficient pages — no login needed.