Last week, this column talked about falling bridges – especially in Bihar—and India’s crumbling infrastructure. Almost immediately after, the Times of India reported on an even more surreal example of wasteful planning — a ghost railway station. Even Harry Potter’s Hogwarts restricted its magic to a single hidden platform at London’s King’s Cross. Nishatpura in Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), however, has an entire phantom railway station.
Built at a cost of ₹6 crore—complete with modern platforms, lighting, seating and a foot-over-bridge—the facility has not seen a single train in nearly three years. Local residents now speak of it as haunted, an eerie monument where silence reigns by day and darkness by night.
As always, the government was aggressively defensive. The divisional railway manager at Bhopal responded to my social media post saying, “Approval has been received for halting of two trains (12919/20 Malwa Express and 11465/66 Somnath Express) at Nishatpura Station… soon.”
निशातपुरा स्टेशन पर दो ट्रेनों (12919/20 मालवा एक्सप्रेस एवं 11465/66 सोमनाथ एक्सप्रेस) के ठहराव की स्वीकृति प्राप्त हो चुकी है, शीघ्र ही यात्रियों की सुविधा के लिए इन दोनों ट्रेनों का ठहराव निशातपुरा स्टेशन पर शुरू किया जाएगा।
The operative word is ‘soon’—a reaction to public embarrassment—is still without a fixed timeline. The Indian Railways further exposed the lack of planning in its clarification that the station was built as part of a broad-gauge conversion but commercial operations were delayed due to ‘low projected initial traffic’ and ‘pending safety clearances’!
This is not an isolated anomaly. Over the past decade, money has been poured into ambitious and experimental projects. Some, such as the Vande Bharat trains, have demonstrably improved passenger services. But many others have remained stranded long after the fanfare and publicity around ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
From silent stations to empty schools, airports built for the public that come alive only to land chartered flights of politicians; idle power plants and payrolls padded with phantoms, roads and bridges that either do not connect, or remain under construction for a decade – they have been a major drain on the resources of a country that can ill afford this scale of waste.
Consider a few documented examples.
Railways
Nishtapura is not an exception. The Indian Railways are the backbone of India's connectivity. While Vande Bharat trains, flagged off with great fanfare and promotion, symbolise modernity, the everyday network tells a different story.
Reports of the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) have frequently pointed to vast tracts of railway land that remain undeveloped or are encroached upon, even as maintenance burdens grow. While new trains are being flagged off with great fanfare every few weeks, examples of delayed, ill-planned and wasteful projects receive less scrutiny and analysis.
The Mumbai monorail, having narrowed already choked roads in crowded localities, has turned into a ₹4,000-crore+ white elephant plagued by poor alignment and connectivity, low carrying capacity, chronic shortage of rakes and persistent safety hazards like fires that leave it routinely stalled while cluttering valuable road space.
Its escalating annual losses reached ₹460+ crore in FY25–26 alone. Service is spare and ticketing revenue is meagre. The monorail moves less than a tenth of its projected passengers and has had two long shutdowns – a 10-month closure in 2017 after a fire and an 8-month stoppage in 2025 after breakdowns. Meanwhile the government ignores all suggestions to repurpose it effectively for the city’s needs. (Mumbai Monorail: After a Decade of Dysfunction, Will the New Revival Plan Deliver?)
Education
In a country with high poverty, poor literacy and worrying joblessness, official data and NITI Aayog’s report tell us that 94,000 to 100,000 government schools shut down between 2014 and 2024 and another 18,727 between FY20-21 and FY24-25.
Government schools lost around 8.6mn (million) students (private ones gained an equal number) and, yet, phantom schools with zero student enrolment list teachers on their payroll, drawing salaries for empty classrooms.
In Maharashtra alone, the CAG audit of 2024 (tabled in July 2026) has exposed six government-aided hostels were ‘ghost’ facilities, or largely on paper, but they received ₹1.62 crore over four years, despite being locked, dilapidated and disused. Records were falsified to show staff and students.
The physical school buildings constructed under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) now sit abandoned. Across rural India, former school buildings have been converted into cow sheds, grain storage units, or local dump sites.
A CAG audit of Delhi uncovered unused hospital plots that were acquired years ago and operation theatres lying idle, while wards of public hospitals are so over-crowded that patients lie on floors. Bihar has medical facilities that exist only in government files. In Gauhati Medical College, funds evaporate without delivery.
The CAG’s audits of the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY) reveal a recurring, tragic pattern: funds are disbursed, contractors build the physical structure, the project is marked ‘100% complete’ on Central dashboards, but because there is zero coordination with state health departments regarding human resources, the building becomes an immediate ‘ghost asset’.
Airports
UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik or Letting the Ordinary Indian Fly) is the catchy slogan that created abandoned, or ghost airports instead of expanding connectivity. The scheme allowed construction of dozens of new airports at a cost of over ₹4,000 crore. The CAG report on UDAN has said that 52% of routes that were awarded never even started and only 7% sustained beyond the three years when subsidies were offered.
Six out of seven new airports in Uttar Pradesh (UP) launched post-2021, suspended operations (Azamgarh, Aligarh, Moradabad, Chitrakoot, Shravasti, Kushinagar). Hisar in Haryana, was to be an alternative to Delhi – apart from occasional VIP landings, stray dogs occupy runways. Several others, including one in Sikkim, Pondicherry and Sindhudurg, suffer from poor planning, over-optimistic projections and ignoring local economic and traffic demand. (cag.gov.in, Report No. 22 of 2023)
Digital Ghosts
Then there are the ghosts lurking in several much-hyped digital databases. Instead of ensuring that wages, subsidies and scholarships reach their intended beneficiaries, these systems have often become conduits for leakages and fraud.
In Telangana, an Aadhaar-linked audit unearthed 7,000 ghost employees drawing regular salaries, complete with bogus IDs and duplicate accounts. At least such audits indicate that the clean-up has begun. In Madhya Pradesh, a review found tens of thousands of retired, transferred or deceased employees still listed in official databases.
CAG probes have exposed ghost employees at municipal bodies in Ludhiana and Nagpur allowing crores of rupees to be siphoned off in fake wages. Subsidy schemes are a clear magnet for ghosts. The MGNREGA scheme in Karnataka showed ghost workers and fabricated job cards.
In almost every case, this is enabled by collusion between officials and private agencies and a government which is obsessed with digital dashboards on ministries’ websites that tick off completion without verification. So the promise of water in every house is declared successful, based on taps and pipes, without water flowing through them. It is no different from the swachh Bharat abhiyan – which saw thousands of toilets being built with no sanitation or water connections – just a waste of funds and tick-box approach.
This is more than inefficiency; it is a betrayal of public trust. Decades of investment in infrastructure—railways, power, education, health—should have transformed lives; yet, ghosts proliferate amid demographic shifts, migration and uneven growth. Private providers increasingly fill the gaps where public delivery falters, widening inequality.
The ghosts of Nishatpura are characteristic of a development model that rewards announcements over outcomes. CAG audits have sounded alarms for years—on stranded power plants bleeding thousands of crores; phantom employees siphoning salaries; and schools and airports that exist only in dashboards.
As India chases Viksit Bharat by 2047, this spectral infrastructure risks turning ambition into illusion. Citizens funding these white elephants through taxes and failure of services deserve better: rigorous pre-project audits, systematic verification to slay payroll ghosts, penalties for delays and misreporting and a revived RTI to pierce the veil of official denial.
Without ruthless accountability—recoveries, prosecutions and a pivot from quantity to verifiable quality—the dream will remain haunted. The choice is clear: Exorcise the ghosts now, or let them multiply at the nation's expense.
It should by now have become quite obvious that all 'development projects' are essentially revenue generating activites for the ruling establishemnt at municipal, state or national level. Money is generated through contracts awarded at inflated price, with built-in cost escalations. Examples are needless flyovers, road widening, paver blocks and concretisation at municipal level; roads, bridges and irrigation projects at sate level and of course even grander projects at national level akin to those quoted in this report. Recently a contractor in Maharahstra went on record to say that fifty six percent of any contract amount is paid to Babus, MLAs and Ministers, the remainign sum is not enough to build anything with any level of quality. This is not merely wastage, this is an example of engineered corruption.
It will be more informative and make more logical if the flaws are quantified in relation to total built. Otherwise, it might give distorted picture! I have seen China building total town with almost 100 tall minimum 15 storeyed blocks in almost 300 KM of my road trip from Shanghai to interior. And totally unoccupied! I was told they are there in anticipation of future requirement but still unfulfilled! That was in 2007!
Appreciate the detailed article highlighting the government profligacy and wasteful spending on ill planned infrastructure. I thought this was an issue with China earlier.
Excellent researched article. Bibek Debroy, the late Chief Economist, has mentioned that Railways should be delinked. His Report or his name has been removed by the Modi Government,
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