Mumbai: The Palava flyover in Mumbai had to be shut for traffic barely seven days after its inauguration on 4 July. The arterial infrastructure in Kalyan had taken seven years to be ready. Blocks of gravel melting at the roadside, bulldozers, and JCBs are now back at work, tearing up this newly built road and relaying it with fresh asphalt. The bridge wears the badge of making it to the long list of great Indian infrastructure debacles.

Bridges are being built with sharp right-angle turns, many are falling, and highways are cutting through people’s balconies. Flyovers are folding. India is having a civil engineering crisis, unable to keep up with its infrastructure ambitions.

India’s financial capital, which is spending billions of dollars for an infrastructure uplift, has become one of

See Full Page