India has never invested more heavily in infrastructure than in the past decade. Highways, expressways, airports, tunnels, bridges and ports have been built at record speed. These have been showcased through drone footage, glossy videos and high-profile inaugurations as proof that the world’s fifth-largest economy is finally building at the scale expected of it.
The transformation is visible. Mumbai’s Coastal Road has reclaimed the city’s western waterfront. The Atal Setu trans-harbour link, first proposed in the late-1960s, was constructed in record time. The ‘Missing Link’ on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, another long overdue project, is an engineering feat through challenging, yet spectacular, terrain. Large expressways linking Nagpur to Mumbai, Mumbai to Delhi and others nationwide have improved connectivity and reshaped landscapes.
Yet, there is a darker side to many of these projects that appears with depressing regularity on social media. Newly-built highways and expressways develop craters or cave in within months; reports of bridges collapsing — especially in Bihar — have become almost routine. Social media reels and memes about design blunders might seem comic, if they did not involve public safety and thousands of crores of taxpayer money. In most such cases, we never get to know who is accountable.
Mumbai, India’s financial capital, has seen two striking examples. The rebuilt Gokhale Bridge, meant to connect with the Barfiwala flyover, showed a glaring two-metre gap that went unnoticed until near completion. More recently, the Mira-Bhayandar flyover opened with a sharp compression from four lanes to two at an awkward angle, creating an obvious traffic hazard. Both were initially defended as ‘coordination issues’ before public outrage prompted patchwork fixes. No one faced meaningful consequences.
Infrastructure failures, due to natural calamities such as earthquakes, typhoons, landslides or forest fires, happen all over the world. Japan designs for seismic activity and heavy rain; Northern Europe for freeze-thaw cycles; coastal cities around the world prepare for cyclones and rising sea levels. Climate change has heightened challenges everywhere, but it cannot excuse roads disintegrating or bridges failing within months. A bigger problem is the response to failures.
There is a familiar pattern across India—infrastructure failures cause little outrage, and are either defended or blamed on climate and geology. There are ex-gratia payments, suspensions (often temporary) and arrests, only in cases of high casualties, and then a quick media fade-out. Blacklisting of contractors or consultants, even when it happens, is usually short-lived.
Audit reports by the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) are often hard-hitting but have little impact because they surface years later. Meanwhile, the same agencies receive fresh contracts, sometimes by setting up new companies, or making large political donations.
The most disturbing aspect is how we have begun to accept the normalisation of failure. Between 2021 and 2025, an independent tally by Newslaundry reported 170 bridge collapses across India with over 200 deaths; the official figure was much lower.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Bihar, where 26 bridges have collapsed, including 15 in 2024 alone. Ten bridges across six districts failed in a 16-day span in mid-2024, prompting a Supreme Court PIL (public interest litigation).
The Aguwani Ghat-Sultanganj bridge over the Ganga, estimated to cost around ₹1,750 crore, has collapsed repeatedly during construction—in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Initial excuses cited winds or storms; but probes revealed design and construction flaws. Yet, it never became a sustained national scandal – instead, it was reduced to memes, jokes and viral videos.
The 594km (kilometre) Ganga Expressway near Ankleshwar built at a staggering ₹36,230 crore developed cracks soon after its inauguration by the prime minister. After the first monsoon showers in July, there was a seven-metre cave-in on a link road.
The 2023 Silkyara tunnel collapse in Uttarakhand trapped 41 workers for 17 days. The dramatic rescue operation by ‘rathole miners’ attracted global admiration, but the investigations revealed criminal lapses in planning, execution and the cost-saving omission of a crucial escape shaft. Coverage of accountability was minimal.
This pattern of repeated failures and often brazen responses points to deeper governance issues that go beyond technical, engineering and policy issues. How did a country that once built infrastructure designed to last generations become one where so much of its new infrastructure is beset with design flaw, poor construction or last-mile planning problems that appear soon after they are commissioned?
Poor materials, contractor collusion with politicians, inflated costs and weak supervision have long plagued public works. Corruption is an obvious factor; yet, it does not fully explain why problems are worsening, despite advances in engineering knowledge, construction technology and artificial intelligence (AI)-aided design.
The indecent rush for grand inaugurations, often timed before elections, lead to compressed timelines and skirting quality audits. The consequences are visible everywhere.
A 2023 CAG audit of the Bharatmala programme highlighted NHAI’s (national highway authority of India’s) approval of the Dwarka Expressway’s civil construction cost at roughly 14 times the benchmark (₹250 crore/km versus ₹18 crore/km sanctioned), with no justification on record. Other audits flagged irregular toll collection and weak oversight.Yet, these findings generated little public debate and even less visible corrective action.
Elsewhere, such lapses trigger investigations. India appears to be moving in the opposite direction. The defensive narrative surrounding these infrastructure failures reached a height – not in Bihar, but in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly. On 6 July 2026, a landslide blocked the newly-opened ‘Missing Link’ of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway for over 18 hours. Restoration began promptly amid heavier-than-usual rainfall in the ghats. What was surprising was the umbrage and anger with which the state leadership responded to criticism in the Assembly. The chief minister lashed out at critics calling them ‘hired trolls’ and ‘habitual liars’ out to malign Maharashtra. He also warned of action against those spreading ‘misleading’ information.
This response is deeply worrying. Citizens have every right to expect quality infrastructure and to highlight failures. When showpiece projects like the Coastal Road require constant patching, concrete slabs fall from flyovers on vehicles and hoardings kill people, treating scrutiny as political sabotage only discourages the accountability that is urgently needed.
India’s infrastructure story has become a tale of two realities: grand inaugurations celebrated with fanfare and failures that vanish from headlines with little follow-up or systemic reform. In any functioning democracy, the routine collapse of multi-billion-rupee public assets should trigger deep political reckoning and criminal accountability. Instead, it meets a collective shrug, viral memes and a pervasive “chalta hai” culture that normalises shoddy work as the inevitable price of rapid growth.
We are now at a crossroads. The infrastructure boom has delivered visible transformation; but its credibility is being eroded by shortcuts and collusion. Without a systemic overhaul, quality audits, severe penalties for lapses, transparent blacklisting the narrative will shift from ‘nation building’ to ‘built to fail’.
There is much to learn from history. We suffered a lot then with stalwarts like Shivaji Maharaj and his kind rescuing us from complete annihilation. Will such a ‘Messaih’ rise to annihilate corrupt politicians and their kind.
Much is expected of PM Modi
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Much is expected of PM Modi