On July 9, 2025, a span of a 40-year-old bridge in Vadodara in Gujarat caved in, sending half-a-dozen vehicles into the Mahisagar river below. On Thursday (July 10, 2025), 18 people were confirmed dead. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel has ordered an investigation into the cause, which locals have alleged to be the long-standing neglect by local authorities. On June 15, 2025, an iron pedestrian bridge over the Indrayani river in Pune district collapsed due to overloading, leaving four dead. In May, a concrete slab being hoisted by a crane at the site of the construction of a bridge over the Kathajodi river in Cuttack fell on workers below, killing three. Similarly, in 2024, the Ghatkopar hoarding collapse in Mumbai resulted in 17 fatalities. And in 2023, there were more accidents — a girder failure at an under-construction railway bridge in Mizoram left 26 workers dead; a rooftop billboard collapse killed two women in Lucknow; and a pillar collapse at a metro construction site in Bengaluru killed a mother and her toddler. In 2022, the Morbi suspension bridge over the Machchhu river, again in Gujarat, failed, killing more than 140 people. These are only some of the hundreds of incidents involving the catastrophic failure of public infrastructure. They are accompanied by road accidents and deadly fires in crowded areas, both of which regularly claim many lives.
Even if they are isolated, they are not entirely accidental: they are symptoms of India’s ageing infrastructure that is being tested, especially in peri-urban areas, as industrial growth and urban populations expand. Facilities such as bridges, roads and hospitals that were designed for some number of users, are progressively giving way under the weight of more. So also are the departments responsible for their upkeep, many of which remain underfunded, understaffed or complacent. While the authorities have ordered investigations into these incidents, few have yielded failure analysis reports into the public domain. Some also prompted audits but they were restricted to infrastructure of the same type. Given the evident ubiquity of the problem, India must modify asset-creating initiatives such as the Urban Infrastructure Development Fund to have additional priorities and adjust the incentives of rehabilitative schemes such as the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation to help regularly maintain ageing urban assets in all centres, with greater frequency in those peopled by 10 lakh or more. Second, while baseline audit frameworks for municipal bridges exist, they must be enforced more uniformly and transparently. Finally, until then, accidents must trigger a probe by a statutory body plus a mandatory audit of all major infrastructure, and States must endeavour to publish the findings at the earliest.
Published – July 11, 2025 12:10 am IST