Did you check the status of the index creation while in progress? Did you check for blocking?

Does the dev server have just a small amount of RAM or little cpu power?

Those things can affect the creation of the index.

Besides the 172million records, we know so little about your table. Things like total size of the table, data types, what the index was that you created. Those things can also impact the creation time.

Run the script from the following link and post the results for the table in question. Also post things like the table definition and index definition please.

http://bit.ly/tablespace