As governments chase spectacle over governance, India’s cities are crumbling

Indore was crowned India’s cleanest city in August 2025 for the eighth consecutive year, a feat proudly announced on the Indore Municipal Corporation’s website. Five months later in January, water contaminated by a sewage leak in Bhagirathpura led to at least 10 deaths and more than 270 residents being hospitalised.

This contrast between the celebration of rankings and deaths due to poisoned water captures, with grim precision, how spectacle matters more than function in Indian urban governance.

The municipal infrastructure – water supply, sewage lines, public transport, garbage trucks, municipal schools and hospitals – form the creaking backbone on which daily urban life depends in India. But they are being hollowed out, underfunded, and allowed to crumble even as budgets swell and new schemes are enthusiastically announced.

The budgets of Indian civic bodies have swelled over the past decade:the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagar Palike announced a budget of Rs 19,927.08 crore for 2025-’26, up 51.95% from the previous year, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi passed a budget of Rs 17,583 crore for 2026-’27 while the Indore Municipal Corporation’s budget for the past year was Rs 8,236.98.

Yet, the returns on these expenditures are dismal. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’s Municipal Performance Index showed that most cities struggled to meet even modest benchmarks – the highest performing was Indore. The index, launched in 2019, assesses municipalities in 100 Smart Cities and cities with populations exceeding a million.

So where does the money go? Corruption is the reflex answer that many might say. But increasingly public money is flowing towards spectacles: projects that are visible, can be inaugurated and photographed, rather than those that sustaining the municipal foundations that keep cities functional. The preference is towards announcement over the maintenance, ribbon-cutting over repairs, the new over the necessary.

Indore’s municipal corporation aggressively funds “Smart City” initiatives, such as heavily publicised waste-to-energy plants and digital systems, but neglects the mundane yet vital maintenance of older infrastructure. In Bhagirathpura, for instance, uninspected sewage pipes leaked into drinking water supply.

Urban transport illustrates this vividly. The Delhi Metro, once a genuine success story, has become a cautionary template. Once a symbol of modern India, the metro’s dysfunction is masked by ridership data. Commuters have developed elaborate informal knowledge systems of which coaches to avoid, which stations have working escalators, which entry gates have shorter queues.

The metro model also raises a fundamental question: why are more efficient, accessible forms of public transport, like buses, which serve far more people at far lower cost, being sidelined in favour of high-investment, lower-ridership infrastructure?

The Delhi Metro inspired similar models in other cities, but with worse results, like the Lucknow Metro, inaugurated with much fanfare in 2017, which struggles to meet its projected ridership year after year. These projects cost thousands of crores in public money and serve only a fraction of the urban population, yet they are all unmistakably flashy, high-tech and visible.

In cities, meanwhile, existing infrastructure is crumbling. In 2022, a cable-stayed bridge in Morbi, Gujarat, collapsed, killing at least 141 people. An investigation later revealed that the main cables had not been inspected or replaced and there had been no structural audit before the bridge reopened a week before the collapse.

This is symptomatic of a pattern where the mundane work of maintaining existing infrastructure is sidelined because it offers no bragging rights. Politicians cannot hold a press conference about a sewage line that continues to work nor inaugurate a road that is in acceptable condition.

The widening gap between what municipal systems are supposed to deliver and what they actually provide is filled by the informal ingenuity of citizens. Take Bengaluru, India’s tech capital. It has a generous municipal budget, a formal water utility in the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board and an extensive pipe network. But these systems are severely overstretched, designed for a much smaller city.

Residents turn to private water tanker suppliers, which have arbitrary charges and no assurance of quality. The informal economy has filled the gaps created by the inadequacies of the municipal system. The state neither acknowledges this dependence nor regulates the private operators who profit from its own failure.

Similarly, municipalities announce waste segregation policies and smart city initiatives. Expensive mechanical sweepers are photo opportunities while informal waste pickers disproportionately perform the actual daily labour of keeping Indian cities from drowning in their own garbage.

A 2023 study by Chintan Environmental Research found that informal waste workers handle about 60% of waste collection in Indian cities. They have no social or formal employment benefits while working in hazardous conditions. Cities continue to hire manual scavengers, despite legal prohibition, who enter sewers, cleaning them with their bare hands. The municipal system exists on paper but on the ground, it has outsourced its most essential and dangerous work to the most vulnerable workers, without acknowledgement, compensation, or protection.

The spectacle of governance is no bug but the defining feature of civic governance.

Indian cities have enough resources and institutions. But they fail because the political economy of urban governance rewards visibility over viability. Citizens, in turn, are left to improvise their way through the wreckage, relying on informal solutions to formal failures, surviving despite urban governance in India.

Ankush Pal is a sociologist trained at the London School of Economics and Political Science, researching and writing on inequalities, social movements, and urban spatiality.