India’s crumbling public infrastructure is a crisis of accountability as much as quality

A 2023 analysis by credit rating agency Crisil projected that India’s infrastructure spending would hit ₹143 trillion cumulative over the seven years between 2023-24 and 2029-30, more than double the sum spent during the preceding seven years.

If one could simply spend one way to have world-class infrastructure, Mumbai, to quote India’s former prime minister, late Dr Manmohan Singh, will become Shanghai. Unfortunately, there is a problem.

Crumbling infrastructure

A lot of this infrastructure, built at such a colossal cost to the taxpayer, is falling apart almost as quickly as it is coming up. The roofs of newly built airports collapse at the first big downpour. Brand new expressways are developing craters large enough to swallow trucks whole. And bridges are falling down decades before the end of their design life.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 1,630 structures collapsed in 2021 and 1,644 in 2022, the last year for which records have been updated.

A 2020 paper by researchers from the Central Road Research Institute found that between 1971 and 2017, as many as 2.130 bridges (excluding culverts and pedestrian bridges) collapsed, either during construction or before the end of their design life.

Recurring incidents of catastrophic collapses of public infrastructure have cast an unwelcome spotlight on the country’s ability to build quality infrastructure at scale and with speed. The failures waste scarce resources, cost precious lives, embarrass the government, and seriously harm India’s image as an engineering powerhouse, weakening Indian firms’ abilities to win engineering contracts overseas.

Same old response

The government’s response to these catastrophes has been familiar: public expressions of regret, warnings of punitive action, and reiterated promises to improve quality.

Take the response to the latest tragedy, the collapse of the Gambhira bridge with 16 fatalities in Vadodara district in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. A high-level meeting was convened by the Prime Minister’s Office. According to reports, the government has asked all ministries to come up with suggestions to tighten quality norms, re-evaluate materials and the construction process in ongoing projects and take other measures, including stricter punishments for errant contractors.

The trouble is, all of these have been tried before—and have clearly failed to address the problem. Take the oft-repeated assurance to improve quality norms. Norms aren’t the problem here; adherence to them is. The National Building Code of India 2016 for roads and bridges, Indian Road Congress codes for road designs and standards, and various Indian standards for construction material are not too far off global norms, while matching them in many instances.

Same old problem

But a deeply flawed procurement system almost ensures that these standards are not followed. Maximum weightage being given to the L1 (lowest cost) bidder, combined with endemic corruption in public procurement, means that the winning contractor is more likely than not to cut corners on quality and execution to make some profit after the low bid and the skim.

There are other reasons as well. A big factor in infrastructure disasters in India is flawed design. The government departments that procure such infrastructure often lack the technical capability to actually come up with a quality design. There is also a tendency not to engage technical consultants in this process, as well as an absence of third-party audits built into every stage of the process, from design to detailed project report to tendering to execution.

The result is an embarrassing exposure of the lack of basic engineering knowledge and skills. This is exemplified by the L and Z-shaped bridges, Bihar’s bridge to nowhere in the middle of a field, or the railway overbridge in Mumbai, where the two halves of the bridge missed meeting in the centre by over six feet!

Many deeper, underlying causes have led to such a pass. These range from patchy on-ground enforcement of norms and protocols to issues in construction practices and oversight, and a reactive rather than preventive approach. Post-trauma checks abound—routine preventive checks and maintenance do not.

Crisis of accountability

The only real way to prevent the recurrence of such events is to enforce accountability. Not just by punishing the odd contractor (usually blacklisting, which only results in the creation of a new company under a different name), or taking some administrative action against junior officials—a suspension here, a transfer there—which are no more than token attempts to address the problem.

India’s infrastructure quality crisis is a crisis of accountability more than anything else. The lack of accountability, especially up the food chain and, critically, up to the political level, where the real decisions are taken, means that the real perpetrators of such excesses will continue to offend with impunity.