India’s Road To Progress Is Crumbling

For years now, the India story has moved at a frenetic pace of infrastructure construction, with a voluminous length of roadways, multiple major bridges and tunnels, including in seismically fragile regions, massive airport terminals, and so on. Speed and scale dominated the story; stability and sustainability less so. The time of reckoning is well upon us for ignoring the latter side of the equation. Every other week, from some part of the country, there comes news of bridges collapsing, tunnels caving in and often trapping people, and newly laid roads and highways developing cracks and potholes. Such incidents probably peak during the monsoon when the natural elements test the stability and resilience of the infrastructure, but they recur at other times of the year too.

The latest is the Rs 4,200 crore Kanpur-Lucknow Expressway, parts of which developed serious cracks, erosion, and surface slippage, forcing the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to expedite repairs. This was opened for use only three weeks earlier. Clearly, the standard of construction and official quality control was abysmal. The list of compromised infrastructure is long and maps across the country—the airport terminal in Delhi; the ‘Connecting Link’ on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway; the newly inaugurated Mrinaltai Gore flyover in Mumbai; the Srisailam Left Bank Canal in Telangana; sinking highways in parts of Jammu, Kashmir, and the Northeast; potholes on the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway near Shamli and on arterial roads in Bengaluru and Mumbai; and roads caving in, like on the recently inaugurated Ganga Expressway in Unnao.

An estimated 170 incidents of bridge collapses and structural damage, claiming over 200 lives, have been recorded in only the past five years. Between 2020 and 2024, reports show over 23,000 pothole-related crashes, including nearly 9,440 deaths across India. Almost 54,440 people were killed in crashes on national highways in 2024 alone. Common Indians are paying for poor-quality infrastructure with their lives. The problem has multiplied and has assumed disastrous proportions of late. If the much-celebrated infrastructure is turning deadly and does not last even a fraction of its lifespan, let alone decades and centuries as the Mughal and British-era construction did, it points to a systemic failure.

It reflects grave deficiencies in planning, substandard materials, compromised construction, lack of quality control, a flawed certification process, and want of accountability. Contractors are allowed to operate in opaque ways; public funds are accounted for. The Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) cannot wring its hands in helplessness or do patch-up repairs; it is responsible for the endurance of the new infrastructure and maintenance of the old. While state and local governments play their part, the buck stops at MoRTH minister Nitin Gadkari. Given the scale of the collapses and failures, the Opposition would do well to force a White Paper on the subject. Indians deserve better infrastructure.