The malady of public infrastructure in India

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Editor's note: On the afternoon of 4 September, Cyrus Mistry, the former chairman of Tata Sons, was killed along with a friend, Jehangir Dinshaw Pandole, in a car crash outside Mumbai. A few days later, Bengaluru, the soi-disant Silicon Valley of South Asia, was deluged by a biblical flood. The billionaire scion of India’s most distinguished business family killed in a road accident, the poster child of India’s economic transformation submerged in water: the two tragedies threw into nightmarish relief the state of our urban infrastructure. Death on the road is accepted as such a quotidian fact of Indian life that the phrase “road safety” carries a whiff of self-contradiction about it. In 2018, road accidents killed 150,000 people. Last year, the number climbed to 155,000 (it exceeds 170,000 if we include railway accidents)—an overwhelming majority of them pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists. Although India is home to 10% of the world’s registered vehicles, it accounts for up to 22% of all the traffic-related deaths in the world. The consequences of road crashes have a disproportionately devastating effect on the poor; they cannot …