The Pulse | Economy | South Asia

India’s Collapsing Roads and Highways Dent Modi Government’s Image

It has built dozens of expressways and highways at enormous cost. But these have not survived the stress test of even the season’s first rains.

A screenshot of a video by The Lallantop showing the condition of the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway, four months after its inauguration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A video clip of India’s Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari is going viral these days in which he claims that a Dubai prince once asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “export” him to Dubai for six months.

According to the minister, the Dubai royal was so impressed by India’s rapidly expanding road infrastructure that he wanted Gadkari to replicate it in Dubai.

Both Modi and Gadkari, while highlighting the success stories of India’s highway construction, claimed that India is now using space technology in road construction and that by 2024, India’s roads could be comparable with roads in the United States.

It is a good story. It is also an irresistible one for a politician who has spent more than a decade selling India’s highway construction as one of the great success stories of the Narendra Modi era.

There is no doubt that India has developed a vast network of roads connecting major cities and reducing travel time.

However, these much-hyped expressways have not withstood the stress test of even the season’s first rains.

India’s social media has been flooded with video clips showing how these expressways have developed potholes and cracks during the first spell of the monsoon this year.

The biggest story was the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway, inaugurated by Modi on April 14 at a reported cost of about $1.258 billion, which developed large potholes and cracks just three months after its opening.

The biggest ridicule was directed at the government when the Kanpur-Lucknow Expressway, barely weeks after its inauguration, caved in. To avoid embarrassment, the government launched repair works, but the sight of industrial electric fans lined up along a freshly built expressway to dry out waterlogged soil further dented the government’s claims.

Then came the Pune-Mumbai Expressway Missing Link, built........

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