Gurugram, still popular as Gurgaon, fuels Haryana’s economy. Yet when the city sinks into rainwater, chokes on toxic air, or drinks poisoned groundwater, the state retreats into silence.

The betrayal is not just civic, it is political. The city was meant to be India’s calling card to the world, with 250 India-headquartered Fortune 500 companies, 190 crore apartments, gleaming towers, and sky-scraping aspirations. The Millennium City embodied the promise of a rising India. Instead, now it is a tragic spectacle of incompetence, indifference, and incapability. Today, it has become a punchline, its monsoon-swamped streets and crumbling flyovers serving as emblems of civic collapse in globally viral visuals.

The images from recent weeks were a damning indictment — a teenager electrocuted in floodwaters near Sector 90; a cave-in swallowing cars on the Delhi-Gurugram Expressway; flyovers, less than a decade old, showing alarming cracks; arterial roads vanishing under water; commuters trapped for hours; Cyber Hub, Cyber Park or Udyog Vihar, the supposed symbols of corporate confidence, becoming unreachable, inaccessible. This is not just a story of potholes or puddles. It is a deeper betrayal by the very state that milks it yet abandons it.

The ridicule was swift and global. The Guardian called Gurugram “a city drowning in its own ambition.” Bloomberg ran a photo essay titled “India’s showcase city can’t beat the rain”. Social media made the city a global punchline. Someone wrote that a city cannot claim to be futuristic when its foundations are rotting in water and indifference.

The city’s rise has been primarily a........

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