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 plane collapse also resulted in the temporary suspension of operations at the airport’s Terminal 1, intended for 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 raised questions about the rapid pace of implementation of the country’s mega development projects under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Narayan Moorthy, a Delhi-based architect, blamed a number of factors for this, including “sloppy work culture,” frequent use of low-quality materials, “reckless rush to complete projects so that some politician can inaugurate them on a predetermined and politically significant date,” and lack of post-construction maintenance.
“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 at Jabalpur airport in Rajasthan collapsed in heavy rains, while on Saturday a canopy collapsed in the passenger pick-up area at Rajkot airport in Gujarat.
Four bridges recently collapsed in the eastern state of Bihar, while an $80 million 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 many ribbon-cutting ceremonies for these projects, as infrastructure upgrades were a key part of his campaign in this year’s national election, when he won a third term as India’s prime minister. His government said it had built 80 new airports, modernized railways and expanded thousands of kilometres of highways over the past decade.
The projects have been criticized by Indian opposition leaders. Mallikarjun Kharge, president of the Indian National Congress, was among the latest to accuse Modi’s government of corruption after Friday’s incident.
“Corruption and criminal negligence are responsible for the decline of shoddy infrastructure, which has collapsed like a deck of cards in the last 10 years of Modi Govt’s rule,” Kharge wrote in X.
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 of building infrastructure at a rapid pace to meet the demands of a developing country, this is happening without proper attention to its maintenance, reliable maintenance and audits,” Sahoo told Arab News.
“Never before has the country witnessed a kind of infrastructure blitzkrieg planned largely before the elections,” he added. “In a sense, infrastructure fits into the populist narrative of bringing India into the community of great powers. “However, recent incidents severely expose 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 lack of concern for the environment and haste in planning and implementing the project, which proves the saying that ‘haste makes evil,’” Srivastava said in an interview with Arab News.
“The infrastructure disaster is damaging India’s reputation around the world. “The unseemly rush to build ‘world-class infrastructure’ and its subsequent collapse are causing irreparable damage to India’s reputation.”