Municipal Accountability Crisis in India: Why Gurgaon Drains Prove We Must Pause Other Reforms

A lot of attention last week went to the schools buses stuck in water logged roads in Sector 48/ Sohna road area in Gurgaon. Let me show something simpler and which also explains what happened that day.

This photograph shows the rainwater drains in Sector 60, Gurgaon.

They were first constructed as solid concrete boxes. At some point someone realised the obvious: drains need to be cleaned. the tops were crudely broken open. Now tiles are being retrofitted on those broken openings. Obviously it cannot be properly done; and now the taxpayers who paid for all these drains, face dangers to their limbs. Remember every stage, original construction, destructive rework, and the current patch-up, has been paid for by Indian taxpayers.

This is not an isolated engineering oversight. It is the visible result of a system in which officials can approve poor designs, and then spend more public money fixing the same asset, without any personal consequence.

In the private sector the outcome would be different. If capital has been destroyed, the project manager, design consultant and approving authority would face real downside: loss of bonus, career damage, possible clawback of compensation, and possibly termination. Investors and boards demand explanations because the money is finite and ownership is clear.  On the public side, a group of incompetent officials is spoiling the well-being of people living in cities through a mix of incompetence, corruption and pure indifference. These people feel completely safe because their jobs and pensions are fully protected no matter how badly they perform.

As an investor who treats every rupee carefully, this waste of public money without any personal cost feels completely wrong. Until officials face real career and money loss for bad decisions and wastage, our scarce funds will keep getting wasted instead of improving citizens’ daily life. Nothing is worth more than improving the quality of life of citizens. That is the fundamental aim of all governmental action and of technological development.

Government has  invested heavily in tools that improve tax collection such as digital platforms, GIS mapping, automated billing. Collection efficiency has risen in many places. Yet the parallel reforms that would impose discipline on how that money is spent are totally missing. Better collection without expenditure accountability simply funds repeated cycles of waste.

The government should pause most new national and state-level policy changes for the next three years and focus almost only on municipal reforms and accountability. The attention must turn inward. Every big programme — industrial policy, digital infrastructure, climate targets, skills missions — finally depends on municipal systems. When a city cannot design a drain that can be maintained or spend property tax money honestly, higher-level reforms give poor results.

A focused three-year effort would free time and attention for the basic work that actually decides daily life: clear responsibility for core services, multi-year postings linked to public scorecards, independent technical and financial audits of major works, transparent city budgets, and real career and money consequences for proven negligence.

The drains in Gurgaon are not a small civic complaint. They show that the present system is failing the very people who pay for it.