Every monsoon brings the same misery. A road in the hills collapses under a landslide. Power lines come down in a cyclone. A railway embankment floods. Crores are spent on repairs, and the following year it happens again.
A new study by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure says this is not bad luck. It is the result of a system that was never designed to cope with natural hazards in the first place. India has lost between $619 billion and $1.02 trillion in infrastructure to weather damage over the years. Roads face average annual flood losses of $172 million. The power sector loses $86 million a year to flooding alone. Railway assets suffer $55 million a year from earthquakes.
With $2.3 trillion of new infrastructure planned through 2026 — and India pushing towards a $30 trillion economy by 2047 — the study's authors say the window to act is now, before the next generation of roads, power lines, and railway corridors is locked in for decades.
The contracts problem
At the heart of it, the study found, is the way contracts are written. When a road is destroyed by a flood, standard agreements treat it as an act of God — nobody's fault, nobody's bill. Whoever has money available pays for the repair.
The study looked at standard bidding documents for roads, railways, and power and found that none of them requires contractors to plan for floods, cyclones, or earthquakes. The power sector documents did not even say what a transmission provider was supposed to do when a disaster struck.
The fix is straightforward in principle: write hazard thresholds into contracts. If a flood stays below a defined level, the contractor pays for repairs. Above it, the government steps in. Japan already works this way on toll road concessions. Contracts should also be extended so contractors stay responsible for defects for ten years, not the current three to five. The roads ministry has already moved to ten years for its own projects; the study says the railways and power ministries should follow.
The money case
Critics have always argued that building more resilient infrastructure simply costs too much. The study tested that claim by running five real projects through a new cost-benefit tool. In every case, the returns were large. Flood protection on a road in Assam returned eight rupees for every one spent. Landslide protection in Uttarakhand returned seven to one. The standout was a power transmission project in Gujarat, where burying cables underground in cyclone-prone stretches returned twelve rupees for every rupee invested and recovered its extra cost within three years.
These figures count only the avoided reconstruction costs. The real returns, once lost revenue and wider economic disruption are included, would be considerably higher.
Adding resilience across India's full infrastructure pipeline would cost roughly $42 billion — about three per cent of total planned spending. The study proposes a dedicated India Infrastructure Resilience Fund, backed by the government and international development banks, to cover that extra cost.
The data gap
One reason resilience has been so hard to build in is that engineers often have no reliable information about what hazards a project site actually faces. Flood records, earthquake maps, and rainfall data are scattered across dozens of agencies and rarely reach the people drawing up designs. The study recommends a single national platform, run by the disaster management authority, where all of this would be held and kept up to date.
Monitoring
Even where resilience measures are written into a design, there is often nobody checking that they are actually built. Project reports rarely include disaster specialists. Once a contractor finishes and leaves, there are no requirements to monitor whether an asset holds up when hazards arrive. The study says every major project should have an independent resilience expert — separate from the contractor — involved from design through to operations.
The insurance gap
Ninety-three per cent of India's infrastructure disaster risk is uninsured. What little cover exists ends when construction does, leaving the operating life of an asset — often 30 to 40 years — entirely exposed. When disaster strikes, the government absorbs the loss.
The study proposes a sovereign risk pool, modelled on similar schemes in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, in which states and central ministries collectively insure public assets and transfer the residual risk to international reinsurance markets. It also encourages the use of catastrophe bonds and parametric insurance, instruments that pay out quickly based on the scale of a disaster rather than requiring lengthy claims processes.
