Why India’s bridges are under troubled waters

Bridges, tunnels and highways are crucial lifelines for connectivity and commerce. Yet, many suffer failures during or after construction, taking a heavy toll on lives and wiping out massive investments. In this deep dive, Mint looks at why things go wrong and how they can be fixed.

New Delhi: The cracks began to appear within weeks. In mid-July, the 63-kilometre, six-lane Kanpur-Lucknow expressway, built at a cost of ₹4,200 crore, had opened with much fanfare. Inaugurated by a glittering cast of political leaders, including Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari, it was expected to cut travel time between the two cities from 2-3 hours to 30-40 minutes.

By early August though, dozens of potholes pockmarked the expressway, forcing The national highways authority of India (NHAI) to partially close it for repairs. For commuters, the promise of a seamless drive across vast fields quickly faded as the highway turned into a makeshift repair site.

Industrial fans lined the route to dry the wet, crumbling road, and excavators and roadrollers worked to patch damaged portions, pushing traffic onto diversions and stopping heavy vehicles from using the highway altogether.

Similarly, in July, the ₹16-crore approach road near Dehradun’s Nanda Ki Chowki bridge caved in just 16 days after its inauguration. A month earlier, a ₹26-crore railway road overbridge in Buxar suffered partial structural failure and came apart days after opening.

Last July, the Gambhira Bridge in Vadodara district collapsed, sending vehicles into the Mahi river, killing 22 people and severing a vital transport link. That tragedy came less than three years after a 19th century suspension bridge in Morbi, also in Gujarat, collapsed barely five days after it was opened during the Diwali season. The footbridge, touted by the state’s tourism department as an “artistic and technological marvel”, had been opened after six months of renovation by a private company. Around 140 people were killed, 55 of them children, and many more were injured when it came apart on October 30, 2022.

Bridges, tunnels, highways and key public infrastructure have long stood as symbols of the country’s culture, history, and engineering prowess, becoming crucial lifelines for connectivity and commerce.

In recent years, many such projects have been inaugurated, including the Chenab Rail Bridge in Jammu and Kashmir, the world’s highest railway arch bridge; the Sela Tunnel in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, located at an altitude of over 13,000 feet; Mumbai’s Atal Setu, India’s longest sea bridge; and the New Pamban Bridge in Tamil Nadu, the country’s first vertical-lift railway sea bridge. And yet, many of India’s infrastructure projects frequently suffer failures during or after construction, sometimes taking a heavy toll in lives.

The list of infrastructural failures is long. According to government figures, a total of 72 projects have either collapsed or shown major deficiencies on national highway stretches from 2020 to 2025. Media reports suggest the figure is far higher—over 170 bridge and flyover failures between 2021 and 2025.

So, why do these disasters occur, and why do they occur so frequently?

No longer about nation building

According to urban researcher Aravind Unni, construction quality, as well as the nature and scale of disasters, have changed, with a direct impact on urban modern infrastructure. “In the past, infrastructure was built to last—designed to withstand almost anything. The projects we built, like dams, were built with a 100-year perspective. They were more than just mega-projects; they were about nation-building,” he says.

But now, infrastructure is often viewed as projects to be delivered, without the sense of pride once attributed to creating a marvel that will last, believe sustainability experts. Consequently, quality suffers, sometimes because of sheer negligence, at other times because corners are cut to meet deadlines or save on costs.

In the case of the Kanpur-Lucknow expressway, for instance, a team of experts from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur engaged by the NHAI reportedly found that the highly plastic soil, which is fine-grained silt used as the foundation underneath the thick upper layers, was the likely cause of the cracks. It was found to be weak, lost structural strength when wet, and shifted under heavy loads. Plastic soil is usually stabilized with chemicals to reduce its moisture sensitivity.

Added to this was an inadequate drainage system, and unpaved shoulders of the expressway meant for further expansion, which allowed water to accumulate and become trapped beneath the pavement, further destabilizing the base. Currently, repairs are being carried out on about 80 patches on the expressway.

According to the findings of the state government’s probe into the incident, the Gambhira bridge collapse was caused by structural failure—systemic corrosion over time and a crushing of the pedestal and articulation joints that support the deck of the bridge on which vehicles ply. These critical support points connecting separate sections of the bridge disintegrated under vehicular pressure, decay, and structural fatigue.

A special investigation team looking into the Morbi collapse blamed it on severe structural corrosion, shoddy repair work, and extreme overcrowding. Nearly half of the wires of one of the two main cables of the suspension bridge were corroded, it found. Old suspenders were welded with new ones, and the walking structure was made up of rigid aluminium panels instead of flexible wooden planks.

Systemic issue

According to construction, engineering and infrastructure consultant Devanshu Pandit, while India has undertaken a massive amount of infrastructural projects, it does not yet have the capacity to match the demand.

“We are missing sufficient equipment and manpower. Contractors are moving up the ladder despite not always having the necessary experience or manpower. We need stricter qualifications based on the amount of work a contractor can handle, their technical capacity and the value of projects they have the ability to execute,” says Pandit. “We need to have better checks and balances and supervision by third-party consultants who perform their role effectively. This model can work well. But when the supervision goes to an urban local body, it can become an issue if they are simply used as a rubber stamp.”

An official working within the ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH), who did not want to be named, admitted that the rapid pace of project execution does impact the quality of work. One key reason, he told Mint, is that low bidders, typically smaller contractors, are aggressively undercutting prices and are willing to take a loss just to build their portfolios and add a major government project to their credentials.

Contractors do not always have the capacity to deliver a project. Smaller ones with thin CVs undercut prices and are willing to take a loss just to add a major government project to their credentials, says an NHAI official.

To be sure, India needs infrastructure, and is finally giving it the attention and money that is needed. The flow of funds into central capital expenditure, of which a large sum is spent building roads, highways and other public connectivity infrastructure, has significantly increased to ₹12.2 trillion ($133 billion) in the current financial year. It is driven by the ₹111 trillion national infrastructure pipeline, with top allocations for MoRTH ( ₹2.8 trillion) and Indian Railways ( ₹2.52 trillion).

Yet, there have been major cost overruns, according to recent monthly flash reports on central sector infrastructure projects published by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI). Infrastructure projects worth more than ₹150 crore each recorded a cumulative cost overrun of approximately ₹3.4 trillion ($40 billion) while 750+ projects face delays, ranging from 12 months to over eight years, in part due to land acquisition and slow environmental clearances.

Remedial measures

Mint approached the NHAI and MoRTH seeking details on how they were addressing failures and poor-quality infrastructure across the country.

In the case of the Kanpur-Lucknow expressway, heads began to roll soon after the cracks appeared: NHAI disqualified the contracted construction firm, M/s PNC Infratech Ltd, from future agency bids. It also issued a show-cause notice proposing a 2% performance security penalty and directed the company to rectify the damaged stretch at its own cost, approximately ₹3 crore.

An NHAI representative told Mint that “adequate measures have been taken against non-compliant firms” contracted to build its projects. “There is a 15-year defect liability period, and in the case of the contractor responsible for the Kanpur-Lucknow project, we have debarred the firm for three years. The government is not bearing the repair costs—the firm will cover everything, including lost toll revenue,” the representative added.

Following the collapse of the Gambhira Bridge, the Gujarat government suspended four engineers from the roads and buildings department for negligence and launched a statewide safety audit of over 1,800 bridges. It resulted in the immediate closure or heavy-vehicle restriction on many of them due to more than 130 structural risks.

The central government, meanwhile, primarily through MoRTH, has enforced nationwide mandatory pre- and post-monsoon bridge inspections under updated safety standard operating procedures, including specialized underwater and scour-depth assessments for major river crossings, and fast-tracked real-time safety data integration into the Indian Bridge Management System (IBMS).

Additionally, independent empanelled experts have been mandated to conduct immediate root-cause reviews, while third-party structural safety clearances have been made mandatory before traffic on any aging or compromised bridges is restored.

Last month, MoRTH announced bridge monitoring would be separated from routine highway contracts and assigned to specialized agencies in order to detect early structural deterioration and prevent collapses. While these agencies manage hardware, sensors, and real-time data transmission, IIT Madras and the centre for development of advanced computing will develop the analytical software.

“We are fixing the alignment of all stakeholders involved in infrastructure projects. For example, we are streamlining permissions across departments, including the environment, which were causing delays in projects and leading to increased costs. Second, we are fixing concerns in the planning stage,” C. N. Singh, a MoRTH joint secretary, told Mint. “For example, the detailed planning report (DPR) was not being done professionally. We found that the lowest bid process being followed was leading to shoddy, low-quality work. So, a root cause analysis was done and it led to a change. Now, the selection is done on a fixed, fair rate and the firm’s previous ratings.”

Another concern across government departments has been the human toll of infrastructural flaws. “People dying on the roads is a bane. We are creating more accountability—if such accidents happen, the company that has done the DPR will be blacklisted as well. Additionally, we studied the last 10 years of PPP agreements and found the root causes that led to arbitration and changed them because it was having a long-term impact on the use of public funds,” he added.

Mint reached out to several prominent construction firms contracted to build public infrastructure for comments on key issues, but did not receive a response.

The way forward

Rather than acting after issues crop up, experts believe that quality should receive priority from the design stage itself and monitored throughout the lifespan of a structure. One of the ways to achieve infrastructure that is built to last at least 75 years is by transitioning from predominantly reactive maintenance towards predictive maintenance, says Suresh Bhalla, professor (higher administrative grade) at the department of civil and environmental engineering, IIT Delhi. Integrating real-time, sensor-driven monitoring, which is still at a nascent stage in India, can serve as a continuous information backbone to prevent accidents and failures, he added.

“It is imperative that critical infrastructure be instrumented with a basic structural health monitoring (SHM) system from the construction stage itself, with the provision to progressively scale up its capabilities as the structure ages and its monitoring requirements evolve… Systematic monitoring of response data can enable early identification of anomalies, deterioration and potentially unsafe trends, allowing timely investigation and corrective intervention,” Bhalla told Mint.

To this end, the smart structures and dynamics laboratory at IIT Delhi has developed more than a dozen sensor systems to apply to real-life infrastructure in India. It has also incubated a startup, Sanrachna Prahari Private Limited, to commercialise and deploy these technologies.

The goal should be to make SHM an integral component of the infrastructure lifecycle strategy, “beginning with construction, evolving through operation and maintenance, and ultimately contributing to safer, more resilient and economically sustainable infrastructure,” added Bhalla.

Additionally, there needs to be a shift in design thinking to make it more aligned with what is environmentally more sustainable, says urban researcher Unni. “Bigger does not necessarily mean more resilient. We need porous infrastructure that lets water through naturally (such as on riverbanks), along with a shift in broader design. The devastating impact of the recent floods in Nepal has made it more urgent to ensure future guidelines are more alert to the geographical vulnerabilities of local terrain.”

As scrutiny from government bodies, engineering experts, and sustainability advocates grows, the hope is that a mindshift change and greater accountability will ensure that as India builds bigger, it also builds better.