Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI:India is building at a scale and speed unprecedented in its post-Independence history. Expressways are slicing through states, airports are coming up in tier-2 cities, metro rail networks are expanding almost simultaneously across a dozen urban centres.
On paper, this is the infrastructure moment policymakers long promised would unlock productivity, jobs and growth. On the ground, however, the lived experience in many cities tells a more disquieting story: congestion that refuses to ease, projects that overrun timelines, and urban services that buckle under the weight of rapid expansion. The question is no longer whether India can build, but whether it can govern what it builds.
Consider urban roads. Despite thousands of kilometres of new highways and flyovers, traffic in India’s major cities has worsened. The problem is not engineering but coordination. Roads are dug up repeatedly by multiple agencies — municipal bodies, water boards, power utilities — often without shared planning or accountability. The absence of unified command turns infrastructure into a revolving door of disruption, eroding the economic gains such investments are meant to deliver.
Airports tell a similar story. India has added or upgraded dozens in recent years, boosting regional connectivity and passenger capacity. Yet access roads, last-mile public transport and airspace management lag behind. New terminals gleam while passengers crawl through bottlenecked approach roads. The aviation ecosystem — regulators, city planners, state governments and airport operators — moves in silos, creating friction that no amount of capital expenditure can fix.
Metro rail projects, once seen as the antidote to urban congestion, now expose another governance fault line. Construction delays, cost overruns and patchy integration with bus and feeder services limit their impact. In several cities, metro ridership remains below projections because land-use planning has not kept pace.
High-density housing, commercial hubs and pedestrian infrastructure have not been aligned with transit corridors, undermining the very logic of mass rapid transport.
India’s infrastructure development must now focus on governance capacity as much as capital outlay. That means empowering city governments, integrating planning across agencies, and measuring success by utilisation and service delivery, not kilometres built or terminals inaugurated
At the heart of these failures lies a structural problem: India’s cities are administered by institutions designed for a far smaller, slower urban economy. Urban local bodies lack financial autonomy, technical capacity and decision-making power. State and Central agencies dominate project execution, while municipalities are left to manage consequences without authority or resources. This imbalance produces impressive assets but weak outcomes.
The obsession with ribbon-cutting also distorts priorities. Political rewards favour visible construction over less glamorous reforms — zoning rationalisation, traffic management, maintenance regimes and data-driven urban planning. Yet it is these invisible systems that determine whether infrastructure improves quality of life or merely adds concrete.
India’s infrastructure push is not misguided; it is incomplete. The next phase must focus on governance capacity as much as capital outlay. That means empowering city governments, integrating planning across agencies, and measuring success by utilisation and service delivery, not kilometres built or terminals inaugurated.
If India fails to make this shift, it risks an urban paradox: world-class infrastructure coexisting with everyday dysfunction. Building faster than we can govern may create headlines today, but without institutional reform, it will only deepen urban chaos tomorrow.