The latest row in Bengaluru, triggered by Blackbuck co-founder and CEO Rajesh Yabaji blaming the Karnataka capital's pathetic state of roads, is a symptom of a larger problem that every Indian is aware of, but has conveniently ignored over the years of inaction and indifference.
Potholes, clogged drains, garbage mounds, lack of signage, and the intriguing case of 'peeling of roads' that were just paved. This is not just a Bengaluru problem. Go to Mumbai suburbs, Jaipur pathways, Kochi city streets, Delhi outskirts—no matter the government, no matter the city department in charge, the problems are the same.
India's road infrastructure, despite massive investments under programmes like Bharatmala Pariyojana, suffers from widespread quality deterioration.
On a wider note, it severely impacts economic productivity and public safety.
Dusting away my Transportation and Pavement Engineering textbooks from my college days, I decided to explore why this happens.
Just nudging on the topic itself reveals that the poor state of Indian roads opens a Pandora's box—a complex web of technical, managerial, and systemic failures, married to inadequate quality control, substandard materials, poor construction practices, insufficient drainage systems, and weak governance mechanisms.
For the sake of technicality, tar is referred to as bitumen, and roads as pavements.
Why Indian roads deteriorate
Construction quality control failures
The most fundamental issue plaguing Indian roads is systematic quality control failure during construction.
Reports indicated that construction defects account for approximately 59 major instances of damage across 15 states between 2019 and 2024.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways categorised these defects under four major heads: pavement issues (cracks, rutting, settlements), retaining wall failures, bridge and structural damages, and construction shortcomings.
Now, let's look at the research. Quality control gaps manifest in multiple ways. Poor mix design (how the ingredients are mixed) adds to inadequate compaction, subgrade failure, and poor drainage, which emerge as the major reasons for premature pavement (road) deterioration. Research on National Highway stretches (Upadhyay and Chouhan, 2025) revealed more disturbing trends—improper bitumin (this is what is called 'tar' in commonspeak) mixes with poor quality materials, heavy traffic loads, and inadequate drainage systems create a cascade of structural failures.
Material quality and spec issues
Using substandard construction materials significantly compromises road durability.
Studies indicated that inferior-grade bitumen, poor-quality aggregates (gravel, sand, and the like), and low-grade steel were used to cut costs, given the lack of strict enforcement of quality standards.
Research on bitumen pavement failures (Kumar and Kumar, 2022) specifically identified insufficient binder content, oxidation, and water infiltration as major causes of structural distress, including rutting, fatigue cracking, and pothole formation.
The Indian Roads Congress (IRC) standards, particularly IRC:82-2015 for maintenance of bituminous road surfaces, established comprehensive guidelines for material specifications and quality control measures. But they stayed on paper.
Field evidence (Aryan et al., 2024) revealed that these standards were not followed, resulting in failures manifesting within 2-3 years instead of the designed 15-20 year lifespan.
Inadequate drainage infrastructure
What are Indian roads without the regulation monsoon drainage seeping in? Poor drainage systems have always been the Achilles' heel of Indian road infrastructure.
The sheer inadequacy of proper drainage (Karthik et al., 2025) caused premature pavement failure, leading to cracks, settlement, rutting, and marshy conditions. Excess water content in pavement base, sub-base, and sub-grade soils caused early distress and structural failure (Kumar and Patel, 2019).
It is easy to blame monsoons, but India has always had them. During heavy rains, inadequate stormwater disposal systems directly lead to more potholes forming.
Field investigations confirmed this multiple times. Bad water drainage led to cracking and potholes in roads, which eventually led to increased accidents due to wet surfaces and widened potholes (Rana and Singh, 2018).
Subgrade and foundation problems
Subgrade is the ground that is prepped before making the road on it. Simply put, it becomes the soil that touches the bottom of the road surface.
The quality and properties of this subgrade soil play a major role in the health of the pavements.
Poor subgrades, like clayey and expansive soils, need more work done on them before road construction (Eisa et al., 2022).
Weak subgrade soils also mean thicker pavements, which shoot up construction costs (Zajua and Sharma, 2024).
Subgrades fail if the soil is not stabilised and not properly compacted before road construction, with water seeping.
The California Bearing Ratio (CBR)—which is the scientific score to evaluate how good the soil is—falls below design requirements in India more often than you think, compromising the structural integrity of the entire pavement system.
This becomes even more dangerous in regions with high groundwater tables or seasonal waterlogging conditions (which is most of coastal India!).
Traffic and overloading issues
Vehicle overloading is something people are not aware of. Roads are made to technical requirements that factor in the ideal loading of vehicles, too. But many of us have seen trucks overloaded plying the highways.
Roads deteriorate faster in such places.
If you have ever travelled on the approach to Vizag from the Andhra Pradesh coastline road, you know what I'm referring to.
One in every three trucks in India exceeds maximum load limits, with overloaded vehicles contributing to 50 per cent of all traffic collisions.
And this is not mere immediate structural damage. They reduce the overall service life of the road, and have a compounding effect on multiple roads failing.
Systematic governance and institutional failures
The construction industry currently suffers from weak accountability and inadequate oversight. Back in March, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari called out civil engineers as "the most important culprits" for the increasing road accidents and fatalities in India—especially those who prepare flawed Detailed Project Reports (DPRs).
He said that small civil engineering mistakes led to hundreds of deaths, while addressing the Global Road Infratech Summit & Expo (GRIS).
Gadkari also moved the ministry to conduct mandatory 100 per cent inspection of all quality control tests by contractors (under EPC mode) recently. Earlier, only 50-60 per cent inspection was the norm.
Things are picking up, but how well these would be implemented is yet to be seen.
Indian roads need a major upgrade—we are not talking about the National Expressways and the like; the roads that need to be better are the daily commuting paths.
This means better project planning, adequate preliminary geological investigations, adhering to road design standards like IRC, and a consideration of local environmental conditions. Roads have to fundamentally be suitable for the conditions they serve.