NEW DELHI: The recent fatal roof collapse at New Delhi’s main airport was the latest in a series of incidents compromising safety at construction sites in the country, raising concerns about India’s billion-dollar infrastructure program.
Part of the canopy and pillars of the departures terminal at the international airport. Indira Gandhi, one of the busiest in the country, collapsed on Friday morning after heavy rain, killing at least one person and injuring several others.
The collapse also resulted in the temporary suspension of operations at the airport’s Terminal 1, which serves domestic flights, affecting the travel plans of thousands of people.
It joins a growing list of infrastructure incidents in India in recent years that have cast doubt on the rapid pace of implementation of the country’s mega-projects under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Narayan Moorthy, an architect from Delhi, blamed this on a number of factors, including “sloppy work culture”, frequent use of low-quality materials, “irresponsible rush to complete projects so that some politician can inaugurate them on a predetermined and politically important day” and no maintenance after construction.
“This whole cocktail combined results in total disasters like the Delhi airport roof collapse that claimed the life of one unfortunate soul and injured many more… Similarly, the roof of the brand new Jabalpur airport, which fortunately had no casualties, exposes our systemic rot,” he told Arab News.
“We have much to be ashamed of when it comes to the quality of our supposedly “world-class” designs.”
A day before the Delhi accident, part of the canopy of the Jabalpur airport in Rajasthan collapsed due to heavy rains, and on Saturday the canopy fell on the passenger pickup area of Rajkot airport in Gujarat.
Four bridges recently collapsed in the eastern state of Bihar, while an $80 billion underpass in Delhi that opened just before the G20 summit in India last year has been flooded for days, snarling traffic on Delhi’s main thoroughfare.
According to Bloomberg Economics, as part of Modi’s construction spree, new infrastructure worth about 44.4 trillion rupees ($532 billion) will come into use over the next two years.
Modi has presided over multiple ribbon-cutting ceremonies for these projects as infrastructure modernization was a key part of his campaign during this year’s national elections, when he won a third term as India’s prime minister. His government said it had built 80 new airports, modernized railway lines and expanded highways by thousands of kilometers over the past decade.
These projects have been criticized by Indian opposition leaders. Mallikarjun Kharge, president of the Indian National Congress, was among the latest people to accuse the Modi government of corruption after Friday’s incident.
“Corruption and criminal negligence are the reason for the collapse of the shoddy infrastructure that has collapsed like a pack of cards over the last 10 years of Modi’s rule,” Kharge wrote on the X website.
Niranjan Sahoo, a senior research fellow at the Observational Research Foundation in New Delhi, said that under Modi, infrastructure has been “transformed into a vote-grabbing gimmick” on an unprecedented scale.
“While the government may have good intentions to build infrastructure quickly to meet the demands of a developing country, (this) is happening without giving adequate attention to its maintenance, reliable maintenance and auditing,” Sahoo told Arab News.
“Never before has the country witnessed an infrastructure blitzkrieg planned largely before elections,” he added. “In some ways, infrastructure plays into populist narratives about bringing India into the community of great powers. But recent incidents have starkly exposed India’s ambitions and capabilities.”
Prof AK Gosain, a civil engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, said one of the main reasons for infrastructure failures is the “deterioration” of construction, adding that there is “no accountability at the top”, leaving people at lower levels to act as scapegoats whenever problems arise.
Anuj Srivastava, an architect at the School of Planning and Architecture in the Indian capital and a veteran of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers, also pointed out the lack of maintenance and accountability in Indian infrastructure projects and the indifference to the environment in the face of a rapidly changing climate.
“The causes of accidents and infrastructure breakdown are the lack of concern for the environment and haste in planning and implementing the project, which proves the saying ‘haste makes waste,’” Srivastava told Arab News.
“Infrastructure disaster is damaging India’s reputation around the world. The inappropriate rush to build ‘world-class infrastructure’ and its subsequent collapse are causing irreversible damage to India’s reputation.”