Crumbling urban infrastructure threatens India’s growth, prosperity

Overflowing or open drains. Cratered roads. Encroachments on every pavement, if at all pavement exists. Toxic air, ceaseless noise, and haphazard construction. Posters that mar our public view lines. Piles of garbage. Waterlogged streets with first showers. Illegal parking everywhere, trees vanishing, lakes disappearing, and unregulated real estate eating up commons.

Ambulances stuck in traffic, streetlights that don’t work, and neighbourhoods where one burst pipe can bring life to a standstill. Progress on paper, but potholes permanent. Whether it’s a single-engine, double-engine, or triple-engine government, our daily urban lives remain a story of dysfunction.

Despite political pretences, manifestos, and endless civic claims, Indian cities are in a mess. The breakdown is structural, the neglect bipartisan — and the silence around it, disturbing.

By all conventional metrics, India’s economy is surging. But as we rush to celebrate our macroeconomic gains, we risk missing a critical truth: much of the economy resides in our cities, and those very cities have been steadily deteriorating — both in form and function.

This year, the monsoons have started early, and with them, the same annual tale of civic collapse. With first showers, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi are in disarray. It is almost paradoxical that while India can engineer cost-effective satellites into orbit with precision and efficiency, among various other accolades, yet it is impossible to build and sustain city roads that withstand a single rainy season. As an annual ritual, politicians will blame nature’s fury in their usual ‘floods & photo-op’ moments, and direct city officials to ‘urgently’ fix things. The sad and silly cycle repeats.

Yet, the Covid-19 pandemic proved that when faced with an urgent crisis, the entire machinery of public office can mobilise with remarkable speed and co-ordination. This begs the question: why can’t we sustain such efficiency in urban administration in ordinary times to build resilient cities and prevent future crises? The capacity exists — it is the political will and systemic bureaucratic accountability that remain elusive. Perhaps the day our civic administrators and political leaders are required to live in the city suburbs, amidst us, and commute like the rest of the citizenry, a deeper empathy may emerge.

The common citizen is exhausted — juggling work, family, and rising living costs — let alone spend hours chasing municipal officials for basic urban dignity. Expecting people to become full-time vigilantes for liveable cities is both unfair and unrealistic. Meanwhile, official statistics paint a picture of near-zero corruption in urban administration, a narrative that’s as convenient as it is misleading. From infrastructure contracts to routine permissions, the quiet seepage of corruption through every layer of civic governance is an open public discussion. Yet, because it is normalised, we no longer even call it out.

The public’s frustration with this chronic civic neglect is understandable, but what is truly disheartening is how all pillars of democracy — elected representatives, bureaucracy, judiciary, and even civil society — seem to fall short in safeguarding citizens’ rights to functional urban spaces. One even wonders how our cities manage to function at all — perhaps it’s proof enough to turn even the most ardent atheist into a believer.

Not surprisingly, Corporate India, showing no spine, has largely opted for strategic silence. Businesses that lose money, talent, and time to civic dysfunction could — and should — be powerful advocates for reform. Yet most use their political capital to secure favourable policies for their balance sheets and for their promoters’ private wealth, not to press for systemic improvements in the cities their employees inhabit and their operations depend on. Yet, advocacy on urban reform rarely finds its way into the priorities of industry bodies or business chambers.

India’s urban population is expected to cross 600 million in a decade. Yet we enter this future with an urban architecture that is creaking under yesterday’s pressures, let alone tomorrow’s. Town planning, or rather pretence of it, is the best kept joke in our midst.

A high-GDP economy built on low-grade liveability is a contradiction we have yet to resolve. And nowhere is this more urgent than in public health and safety. Yet post-Covid-19 pandemic, how much have we really changed? Have our municipal SOPs for emergencies been rewritten? Are local health systems now better staffed and supplied? Are public health departments better funded, trained, and empowered? The answer is no.

India’s public health infrastructure remains fragile, fragmented, and poorly resourced. The urban poor — those most exposed to environmental and occupational health risks — continue to receive the least support. Primary health centres are insufficient and inaccessible. Emergency medical response is unreliable.

Meanwhile, lifestyle diseases are on the rise, antibiotic resistance is growing, and climate-linked health hazards — from heatwaves to vector-borne diseases — are increasing. This systemic neglect is doubly dangerous in cities, where population density, mobility, and pollution amplify risk. The next crisis — whether viral, climatic, or structural — will be met with the same chaos.

The broader question of urban liveability demands urgent attention. All this is unfolding in cities that are still demographically young. By 2050, over 20% of Indians will be above 60. What happens when that future population — less mobile, more vulnerable — faces the same broken systems? Our cities are not designed to serve the ageing, the disabled, or the poor. Without intervention today, our urban spaces will not only be unliveable, but also unworkable for the very people they are supposed to support.

Businesses must push for institutional reform, not just infrastructure projects. They must help set the agenda on urban resilience, rather than merely react to its absence. Embracing stakeholder capitalism and conscious capitalism means recognising the need to build systemic resilience not only within firms but across the urban ecosystems they depend on.

For too long, we have treated economic growth as a tide that will lift all boats. But when the promised tide comes with floods, choked cities, callous urban management, repeated promises and lies, the illusion breaks. Cities need accountable and ethical leadership, seemingly a contradiction now. That’s why Viksit Bharat needs to start with Fix-it Bharat-Cities to begin with.

(Srinath Sridharan, author of ‘Family and Dhanda’, is a corporate adviser and independent director on corporate boards. X: @ssmumbai.)