Bridges and potholes: India's monsoon economy stimulus
Destruction caused by flawed construction must be followed by reconstruction. Effectively, this is an extortionary phenomenon—spending taxpayer monies twice for the same work. Between 2021 and 2024, as per the government, over Rs 17,900 crore was spent just maintaining highways—that is roughly Rs 6,000 crore a year. And the amount is rising. In the current financial year, the government will spend Rs 9,599 crore on fixing roads.
'Pothole budgets' also appear in the budgets of state governments and municipal corporations. Last year, the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation allocated Rs 545 crore to fix potholes; the allocation as of June this year is Rs 154 crore. In 2019, an information request revealed that the BMC had spent Rs 17,693 on each pothole. In Bengaluru, the PWD last year allocated Rs 660 crore for potholes and its municipality spent Rs7,121 crore on them between 2019 and 2022.
The consequences are manifest in human and economic cost. Take death on the roads. In the decade to 2023, over 15 lakh Indians were killed in road accidents. In 2023 alone, there were 4.80 lakh road accidents across the country claiming 1.72 lakh lives—that is, 55 accidents every hour and a death every 3 minutes. Union Minister of Road Transport & Highways, Nitin Gadkari, recently said 'I try to hide my face' at international meets because India tops the list of road deaths in the world. Gadkari also revealed that road accidents cost India roughly 3 percent of GDP.
India's taxpayers, already forking out stamp duties, income tax, road toll and GST, are forced to bear the risks. There is virtually no city in India that is free of flooding in monsoon. As this column has highlighted, this is primarily because there is a drought of action on urban planning. This week, for instance, Gurugram—once dubbed 'Millennium City'—along with Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru were flooded for hours. Floods kept Nagpur's buses off the roads for long. The pace of haphazard urbanisation in Pune has resulted in the city municipality listing 73 new flood-prone areas.
Public policy failures, as I wrote in my book The Gated Republic, have emerged as an alternative business model—be it water, health, education, security or power. The failures of the State impose costs on households—living in cities without pavements, marooned on flooded roads, bearing medical costs of accidents and illnesses, besides refurbishing flooded homes and basement parking spaces. The costs paid by the hapless taxpayer for mitigating these troubles verily morphs into the political economy's annual monsoon stimulus.
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
Author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12 Digit
Revolution, and Accidental India
(shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com)
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