Roads as Lived Infrastructure
- connect2783
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
What our Roads Reveal about Governance in Small Cities?
In India’s small and mid-sized cities, roads are the most visible face of governance and the most overlooked. This blog reframes roads not as technical projects measured in kilometres and budgets, but as lived infrastructure that shapes daily life, safety, access, and livelihoods. Drawing on insights from Nāgrika Fellow Candidates and reporting from cities across India, it explores the disconnect between how roads are planned and how citizens actually experience them.
In many of India’s small and mid-sized cities, the most visible sign of governance is not a government office, a policy document, or a public announcement. It is the road outside one’s home. Whether it is a market street dug up for months, a pothole-ridden lane leading to a school, or a highway repeatedly blocked by landslides, roads shape how people experience the city every single day. They decide how long it takes to reach work, whether an ambulance can arrive on time, how safely a child can walk to school, and whether a local shop survives or shuts down.
Yet despite this centrality, roads are rarely discussed in terms of everyday life. They are treated as technical projects-measured in kilometres built, budgets sanctioned, and deadlines announced, rather than as spaces people must navigate daily.
To understand why this disconnect persists, we need to shift our lens from roads as technical outputs to roads as lived infrastructure. Lived infrastructure refers to the roads, streets, and paths that people actually use every day, and how these shape daily life, including getting to work, school, markets, hospitals, or simply moving safely (UN-Habitat, 2014). Unlike government projects on paper, lived infrastructure is about the real experiences of people who rely on it.
Insights from Nāgrika Fellow Candidates (2025–26), read alongside recent reporting from cities such as Kottayam, Chandannagar, Meerut, Pune, Cooch Behar, Manali, and towns in Meghalaya, reveal a stark mismatch between how roads are imagined by authorities and how they are experienced by citizens. Two patterns stand out: both uncomfortable and rarely discussed.
Insight 1: Roads Don’t Fail from Absence, but from Incompletion
Across small cities, roads are rarely absent. Instead, they exist in a state of permanent incompleteness. News reports repeatedly show the same cycle: roads are dug up for water pipelines, sewer lines, gas connections, or electric cables, and then left poorly restored, uneven, or waterlogged. In Kottayam, potholes have been repaired 7 times but still not fixed and have made roads nearly unusable despite repeated complaints. In Chandannagar, municipal efforts to clear encroachments and rebuild footpaths around Urdi Bazar shows that street works in Chandannagar’s market zones are ongoing changes which, in practice, however can slow footfall and complicate business operations. In Meerut, road projects shut down local access for close to 800 shops, 25 schools and 15 colonies, affecting daily movement and commerce.
Even when new construction begins, as in Cooch Behar’s long-awaited 10-km road project, residents often point out that they had lived with unsafe, broken access routes for years before work finally commenced. The issue is not the absence of infrastructure, but the long delay and frequent abandonment between excavation and completion.
From the state’s perspective, a road project represents an investment and a source of growth. From a citizen’s perspective, it often represents lost working hours, vehicle damage, and reduced income. If roads are meant to support local economies, an important question remains unanswered: why are time lost and income lost never counted as part of infrastructure costs?
This pattern reveals a deeper governance failure. Roads are treated as one-time projects rather than as systems that must be completed, reinstated, and maintained. Accountability ends when digging begins, not when a street is safely restored. Citizens are left to live in a constant state of infrastructure limbo-navigating debris, detours, and danger as the “project” stretches on indefinitely.
Insight 2: When Citizens Repair Roads, Governance Has Already Failed
In several cities, residents are stepping in to repair roads themselves. In Kottayam, locals pooled money and labour to patch damaged roads after repeated official inaction. In Pune’s Bhusari Colony, children were seen filling a pothole that civic authorities had ignored.
These moments are often framed as inspiring examples of community spirit. They are not! They are evidence of governance collapse.
When citizens are required to repair roads themselves, it signals the erosion of institutional accountability envisioned in urban governance. Civic action here is not empowerment; it is forced substitution. Residents pay twice-once through taxes and again through their own labour, money, and exposure to risk.
Fellow candidates echoed this pattern in their cities, noting that such actions often follow exhaustion rather than optimism. People step in because waiting has become unsafe. Over time, this normalises neglect. What begins as a temporary adaptation slowly lowers expectations of what the state is responsible for providing.
No democratic system should depend on children filling potholes or residents repairing public roads to stay safe.
Roads as Risk and Survival Infrastructure
These failures become most visible during climate stress, not because rainfall or landslides are exceptional events, but because they expose neglect that already exists. In Himachal Pradesh, floods and landslides in Manali washed away road links and damaged the Old Manali Bailey bridge, disrupting emergency access, tourism- dependent livelihoods, and daily commuting. The seasonal closure of the Manali–Leh highway and repeated landslides do not represent unforeseeable shocks; they reflect long-standing weaknesses in drainage, slope management, and redundancy planning. A single compromised road can paralyse entire regions because alternative routes and contingency systems were never built.
In Meghalaya, landslides along NH-40 repeatedly cut off access to Dawki, Mawlynnong, and surrounding villages during monsoons. Fellow candidates reported that residents are often completely cut off from cities for days, as they are reluctant to risk travel on unstable roads. Despite repeated fatalities, accountability remains unclear, with responsibility divided among contractors, national agencies, and state authorities.
For governments, a road becomes a problem only after it collapses or is officially damaged. For citizens, the problem begins much earlier; when cracks appear, drainage fails, and everyday travel becomes risky. Climate stress does not create these failures; it merely accelerates them. This gap exposes a critical flaw: roads are built as static assets, not as systems expected to withstand terrain, rainfall, and climate stress over time.
Roads Built to Be Seen, Not Used
Road conditions also shape dignity. Broken pavements force elderly residents onto traffic lanes. Flooded streets make children wade through filth. Poor lighting restricts women’s mobility after dark. Over time, repeated exposure to such conditions leads people to adapt, taking longer routes, avoiding certain hours, or staying indoors altogether. Unsafe infrastructure becomes normal.
This normalisation reflects a broader planning pattern. Across many small cities, visible corridors receive disproportionate attention: beautified footpaths, decorative lighting, freshly resurfaced stretches near entrances or administrative zones. Meanwhile, interior neighbourhood roads, market streets, and school routes remain broken.
What emerges is a politics of aesthetics in infrastructure investment: decisions are guided by visibility rather than vulnerability. and everyday use. The CM Grid Scheme in Moradabad illustrates this tension. While promoted as “smart” modernisation, locals reported dust, diversions, and reduced footfall in local markets. Studies have analysed how infrastructure and urban development are framed through aesthetic logics that privilege spectacle, formal order, or “world-class” appearances, even when these do not align with lived needs or equitable resource distribution (Oommen & Sequeira, 2021).
Such aestheticised planning can mask deeper political choices about whose spaces are made visible and valued, and whose remain neglected, reproducing spatial inequalities in the built environment.
Governance at the Core
At the heart of these failures lies fragmented authority. Citizens often cannot tell whether a road belongs to the municipality, the PWD, a national agency, or a special-purpose vehicle. Larger agencies manage high-visibility routes, while municipalities responsible for interior streets operate with limited resources and authority. This fragmentation is further compounded when utility agencies (such as gas, water, sewerage, or telecom operators) cut roads for service works and either restore them poorly or leave restoration incomplete, with no single authority clearly accountable for enforcing standards or long-term durability.
The 74th Constitutional Amendment envisioned empowered local governments responsible for basic urban infrastructure, including local roads. In practice, this devolution remains partial. Municipalities are expected to receive complaints, conduct inspections, and manage day-to-day disruptions, yet they often lack control over budgets, contractors, technical standards, or coordination with state and central agencies. Key decisions (on design, tendering, and reconstruction) are taken at higher levels, while local governments are left to manage the consequences.
Roads make this governance gap visible every day. A single stretch may be dug up multiple times by different agencies, deteriorate rapidly due to poor restoration, and remain unsafe for months, even as complaints circulate without resolution. The result is not merely poor road quality, but a system in which responsibility is dispersed, authority is diluted, and citizens have no clear institution to hold accountable.
Lessons from Roads in Small Cities
Roads in small cities don’t fail suddenly; they fail slowly, through governance long before they fail as infrastructure. Maintenance is deferred, drainage is ignored, risks are known but unmanaged, and responsibility is fragmented across agencies with no clear owner. Roads are dug up but not fully restored, projects are declared complete without being fully finished, and everyday deterioration is treated as normal rather than an urgent issue. For long periods, this failure remains invisible; absorbed by citizens through longer commutes, lost income, and heightened risk. It becomes visible only when roads collapse during floods or landslides, or when residents are forced to step in and repair them themselves. By that point, the road had already failed as a system of governance.
These failed roads continue to govern our everyday lives. In small cities, they function simultaneously as livelihood infrastructure, risk infrastructure, emergency infrastructure, dignity infrastructure, and political infrastructure. They mediate access to opportunity, safety, and dignity, and in doing so, reveal whose needs are prioritised and whose are routinely ignored.
The experiences documented in this article show that roads do not stop shaping lives when a project is declared “complete.” Long after contractors leave and inaugurations fade, citizens continue to live with the consequences of unfinished, poorly maintained streets.
If small cities are to be genuinely liveable, road governance must move away from counting kilometres and announcing projects, and toward completing, maintaining, and caring for the streets people use every day. The real question is no longer how many roads are built, but how much of everyday life the state is willing to take responsibility for.
What has road neglect changed in your daily routine? Tell us in the comments below.
References
Oommen, T., & Sequeira, R. C. (2021). The politics of infrastructural aesthetics: a case of Delhi’s Bus Rapid Transit corridor. International Development Planning Review, 43(4). https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2020.21
UN-Habitat. (2014). Streets as tools for urban transformation in slums: A street-led approach to citywide slum upgrading. https://unhabitat.org/streets-as-tools-for-urban-transformation-in-slums
Research: Nāgrika Team and Fellow Candidates
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