Gujarat Bridge Collapse Reveals Culture of Neglect in Indian Governance

Repair Pleas Were Ignored, 11 Lives Are Now Lost

July 10, 2025

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At least 11 people were killed and five seriously injured after the Gambhira Bridge in Gujarat’s Vadodara district collapsed into the Mahisagar River on the morning of July 8. The incident lays bare a longstanding culture of neglect and carelessness that defines public infrastructure governance across much of India.

Built in 1985, the 40-year-old bridge fell apart while vehicles were on it, plunging two trucks and a jeep into the river, according to The Indian Express. In the days following the collapse, public anger mounted as old warnings and ignored alerts surfaced.

The most damning piece of evidence was a phone recording from August 2022 in which a Roads and Buildings department official clearly admitted that the same bridge was in critical condition and “would not last long,” as reported by The New Indian Express. The official purportedly confirmed that a proposal for repairs had been sent and that the department had called a design inspection team. Despite this, no reinforcement work was done. The bridge remained operational and eventually gave way.

Further, a member of the district panchayat had reportedly submitted multiple written requests urging urgent repairs to the bridge. None of those appeals resulted in any preventive action either. Activist Lakhan Darbar, who recorded the 2022 conversation, has demanded that the concerned officers face criminal action.

The incident points to a structural problem of negligent governance, where responsibility is diffuse, accountability is rare and maintenance of public infrastructure is treated as a reactive rather than preventive function.

It demonstrates the breakdown of what public administration theorists call the “Weberian model of bureaucracy,” named after sociologist Max Weber. This model is built on the idea of rational-legal authority, where power is exercised through laws and rules rather than personal influence. It relies on formal rules that guide how decisions are made and actions are taken, ensuring consistency and impartiality. It also depends on a clearly defined hierarchy, where each official has a set role and is accountable to a superior, creating an organised chain of responsibility.

In the Indian context, these principles are routinely weakened. Decisions are often shaped by what offers immediate political advantage, rather than by legal obligations or administrative need. As a result, infrastructure projects like bridge repairs may be delayed or ignored if they do not serve electorally important areas or offer visible political returns. Budgetary constraints further weaken the system, as departments struggle to allocate funds even for urgent repairs. Bureaucratic complacency – where officials avoid initiative, defer decisions or shift responsibility – undermines the clear chains of accountability that the model depends on. Together, these forces erode the rule-bound, hierarchical structure central to rational-legal administration.

The fact that officials admitted knowledge of the bridge’s danger two years ago but took no action reveals a disregard for the principle of anticipatory governance. In public policy, anticipatory governance requires foresight mechanisms to detect future risks and institutional readiness to act before they become disasters. It shows that the system lacks even the most basic predictive reflexes. Governance for the department appears to be a mere act of post-mortem.

A bridge is a shared contract between the state and its people – the state promises safety, reliable infrastructure, and continuity of public life, while the people, in turn, trust, use and uphold that system with the expectation that it will serve the common good.

When a bridge collapses despite clear warnings, the state’s responsibility to protect lives also fails. Indian administrative law, including the public trust doctrine, requires the government to safeguard public resources and infrastructure for the welfare of its people. In this case, that duty was clearly abandoned.

A culture of disregard thrives when accountability fails across the system. Written requests from elected representatives were ignored. A formal warning from within the administration went unheeded. No red flags appeared in audit trails. Senior officials are now deflecting attention toward “inquiries” and “technical causes,” avoiding questions of policy and oversight failure. This reflects a familiar pattern in Indian governance – what scholars call passive accountability, where systems act only after a tragedy occurs, not to prevent it.

Imagine a doctor who knows a patient has a tumour, mentions it casually over the phone, says a scan is recommended and then does nothing – because the tumour is slow-growing and the patient hasn’t complained yet. Two years later, the patient dies. Would we say the death was unexpected? Or call it a sudden collapse? This bridge was a known and ignored wound in the system.

India has a long history of tragic infrastructure failures. The Kolkata flyover collapse in 2016 killed 27 people and injured around 80. The Morbi bridge fall in Gujarat in 2022 left at least 141 dead and more than 180 injured. The Siliguri flyover collapse in 2011 added to this pattern of structural neglect. In each case, the sequence of delay, denial and deflection was the same. Yet, institutional learning has been absent.

At the heart of the problem is what constitutional theorists call a lack of democratic responsiveness. Bureaucracies are meant to respond not only to internal hierarchies but also to the public and to elected representatives. This is why a bridge can collapse without anyone in the government resigning or being held accountable. Instead, we wait for yet another report blaming technical faults.

The Gambhira Bridge collapse is the expression of an administrative culture where forewarnings are archived, not acted upon.

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