Krishna Gupta, a lawyer and activist in Mira Bhayandar, Mumbai, witnessed a completely new movement. $100 crore double-decker flyover is taking shape over several months. What puzzled him was its strange layout: four lanes that suddenly narrowed to two, without any warning, signage or proper transition. Just a sudden concrete wall. Gupta raised his concerns informally with officials, but says he was listened to and ignored.
Meanwhile, on January 26 – Republic Day – a local resident photographed the bridge and posted the video on ‘Gems of Mira Bhayandar’, a popular social media account. Within hours, it went viral. The memes came quickly and mercilessly.
The next day, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) responded to its
The bridge has been designed with two lanes for Bhayandar East and “future connects two lanes for Bhayandar West,” she said.
The locals were not convinced. Two days later, Gupta wrote an email complaint to the authorities concerned, raising several critical questions about the Mira-Bhayandar Bridge. He asked why the four-lane bridge was suddenly reduced to two lanes midway without providing the scientifically designed taper and transitional length stipulated under Indian Road Congress (IRC) norms, and what specific IRC codes were followed while approving the geometry.
Gupta also asked whether any road safety audit (RSA) or traffic impact assessment was conducted at the design or post-construction phase and, if so, how this high-risk bottleneck was removed. He also demanded to know who had proposed, vetted and finally approved the design, and on what basis MMRDA was demanding “future expansion” when there seemed to be no plan, timeline, budget or space for additional lanes approved.
He says he has not received any official response yet. Following public backlash, MMRDA joined hands with IIT-Bombay and introduced several safety features, including lane tapers, lane guidance bollards, reinforced concrete barriers, rumble strips, and enhanced reflective signage.
“If there was nothing wrong with the design, as MMRDA claimed on social media, why did it later call up IIT-Bombay and make amendments?” asks Gupta.
MMRDA officials did not respond to HT’s phone calls and text messages for comment on the issue.
Unlimited foolishness
Mira Bhayandar is not an isolated aberration. It’s part of an ongoing pattern of what many call “ridiculous urban development” projects across India. Although the projects vary in scale and context, they all raise the same troubling question: How do designs that seem so clearly problematic to ordinary citizens survive the planning and approval process and end up being cast in concrete?
Last year, many of these projects made headlines — not because of what they achieved, but because of what they revealed about the systems that produced them. In Bhopal, $The Rs 18-crore Aishbagh Railway Overbridge has gone viral for its “dangerously sharp, almost 90-degree turn”. In Lucknow, a railway overpass appeared to extend directly into a house. In Nagpur, images of the Indora-Digori flyover crossing a terrace at Ashok Chowk sparked widespread outrage.
The projects quickly became national memes. The double-decker Mira-Bhayandar Bridge has been mocked as an “engineering marvel”, Bengaluru’s towering electricity pole standing midway in Hebbal has been called the “Eiffel Tower of Bangalore”, and the flyover in Lucknow has been derisively dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World”.
Anger over such projects was not limited to social media.
On April 1, Greenpeace India activists, along with citizen groups under the slogan “Bengaluru Renaissance,” staged a protest across Bengaluru to highlight what they called “stupid projects.” They mixed art and anger, pasting giant prints of Edvard Munch’s famous painting Yelp On the unfinished concrete pillars of long-stalled bridges in districts like Rajarajeshwari Nagar, Ejepura, Jalahalli and Domasandra.
In Rajarajeshwari Nagar, several concrete columns have remained incomplete for nearly three years around the famous ancient arched gate, looming like giant ugliness. Locals aren’t sure if $The Rs 72-crore bridge project has been quietly abandoned or simply halted indefinitely, with the authorities not providing any clear updates despite spending significant public funds already.
“A stupid project is one that consumes huge amounts of public money, destroys blue-green spaces, and fails to deliver what it promises,” says Amruta SN, climate activist at Greenpeace India. She adds that the campaign is not against development. “He is against reckless, unscientific and undemocratic development.”
The bigger question, she says, is: Who is really asking for these projects?
“Bridges, elevated walkways and underpasses are often pushed around without real public consultation,” she says. “What citizens actually need is something very different from what they keep getting. People want a walkable city – a city that is slow, caring and provides third places where they can congregate without spending money.”
The “stupid project” label risks obscuring a more complex reality, says Mitu Mathur, a Delhi-based architect and principal at GPM Architects and Planners, who has worked on numerous large-scale urban design and public infrastructure projects, including airport terminals, railway stations and Delhi Metro stations.
“In cities like Mumbai or Bengaluru, planners are working with highly constrained and often incomplete ground realities – unclear underground facilities, fragmented plots, long-standing encroachments, and shifting political priorities. Approvals and land acquisition rarely align with design timelines, forcing projects into phased or modified implementation midway,” says Mathur.
But she was quick to add that restrictions cannot become a blanket defense. “Relying on ‘constraints’ as an overarching defense hides a critical systemic gap: the lack of unified and comprehensive planning,” she says. “When infrastructure is planned separately, engineering and transportation goals are pushed forward without being integrated into a master plan that takes into account urban design and long-term livability.”
The bigger issue, she says, is that the country’s planning philosophy remains overly focused on expanding roads and highways. “More roads does not mean fewer problems in urban areas,” she says. “In many cases, they simply reinforce car dependence rather than addressing basic mobility and access.”
Jagan Shah, an urban expert and former director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, has a blunt diagnosis. “It is stupidity with impunity – a dangerous combination of incompetence, dishonesty and disregard for the common good,” he says.
Bhopal flyover: turning points
Nearly a year ago, when videos went viral showing the Aishbagh railway bridge making a 90-degree turn, the Madhya Pradesh government acted decisively. Seven engineers were suspended, including two senior engineers.
Then things took a whole new turn!
A court-appointed expert from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (MANIT) Bhopal found that the inflection of the flyover was 118.4 degrees and matched the approved design. It turns out the contractor built almost exactly what they were asked to build. What the public saw as a ridiculous and dangerous 90-degree turn was, on paper, a permissible 118-degree turn. This episode depicted the gap between approval and approval Intent and Logical Reality – The turn was still too sharp and risky for the vehicles.
The Madhya Pradesh government has now relied heavily on the 118.4 degree angle to defend itself. All seven suspended engineers have now been reinstated. PWD Minister Rakesh Singh remains unapologetic about the design of the bridge and the decision to bring back the engineers.
“It was never a 90-degree turn, it was a 118-degree turn, which space constraints necessitated,” he says.
Why were the engineers suspended?
Singh insists that the suspensions were not about the design of the flyover, but rather about the failure of the operation. “We have suspended the engineers as they failed to coordinate properly with the railways and introduce the required safety features. We are currently working on these safety measures and once they are completed, the flyover will be opened.” Regarding their return to their jobs, he says: “Engineers cannot remain suspended from work forever. The administration’s investigation against them will continue.”
Mathur sees this as the system’s most critical failure point.
“The real concern is not that projects deviate from approved designs, but that the approved designs themselves often become questionable too late. The system usually breaks down when multiple approvals occur separately. Road engineering, traffic planning, structural design, and road permits are often reviewed separately, without a final, integrated assessment of how the project works as one living system,” she says.
“Once these approvals are obtained, it becomes very difficult to reconsider the basic alignment or geometry, even when the design performs poorly on the ground,” she adds.
The former chief engineer of the Delhi Public Works Department agrees.
“Engineers are always the first to blame,” he says. “In reality, they are at the bottom of the bureaucratic hierarchy and are often the easiest people to hold accountable. Even when engineers identify design flaws and recommend changes, navigating the bureaucratic process of obtaining new approvals can be very difficult.”
He argues that the problem is not so much the system itself as how it is often affected. “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current system or approval process, provided that special interests — political or otherwise — do not interfere,” he says.
The blame game: a case study of Nagpur
The Indora-Digori Bridge in Nagpur provides a case study in how government agencies deal with embarrassment: by blaming everyone but themselves.
When images of the elevated roundabout on Ashok Square passing alarmingly close to a residential terrace went viral, turning the house into an internet sensation, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) was quick to defend itself. She alleged that the balcony was an encroachment and was reported to the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) for removal. The NHAI assured that the flyover has been built strictly as per the approved designs.
However, NMC said it was never consulted during the Detailed Project Report (DPR) stage and only became aware of the problem after the rotating slab had already been poured. The Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT), one of the agencies involved in the city’s development and land management, has also come under scrutiny, with questions raised as to why it or the NMC did not act earlier.
NHAI project director Abhijit Jichkar rejected the allegations of poor coordination, saying, “NHAI is not a land owning agency. We depend on municipal corporations and other agencies to remove encroachments and hand over the required lands. All agencies concerned have been kept informed throughout the planning and construction process. The bridge was built strictly as per the approved design. There were no coordination issues on our end.”
The system that continues to produce urban absurdities
What surprises Shah is that such projects continue to appear with remarkable consistency – year after year and city after city. Indeed, the absurdity of India’s poorly designed urban infrastructure projects is not a recent phenomenon. Over the decades, cities have repeatedly built structures that are either awkwardly designed, underutilized, or defeat their goals altogether. se.
“There is no effective quality control system,” he says. “Projects go through multiple layers of review. Lack of attention to detail, awareness of quality and duty of care wastes public money and puts public safety at risk.” “Bad ideas should be nipped in the bud, but they somehow manage to survive so-called scrutiny and due process.”
Shah criticizes the increasingly popular EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) contracting model, where design is combined with implementation. “This creates a perverse incentive to cut costs at the planning and design stage,” he says. “When public scrutiny is weak, quality inspection is easily compromised.”
Mathur believes the problem goes deeper. “Many formal reviews focus on budget limits, compliance with rules, and speed of implementation. They often ignore user-centered design, spatial quality, and safety,” she says. “Many disciplines are involved in each project – civil engineers, transportation planners, traffic consultants, urban designers, but their input rarely converges at a stage where fundamental decisions can still be changed.”
“By the time multiple agencies gave their approval, much of the basic structure was already in place,” she says. “Subsequent interventions will have to work within those existing constraints, rather than change them.”
“The last line of defense should be an empowered independent review layer – road safety auditors, urban designers and technical reviewers not tied to the project implementation chain – who sit above individual departmental approvals,” says Mathur.
“Besides, there is a need to shift to AI-assisted simulations, GIS-based modeling, and digital twins of stress test designs in dense urban conditions before they freeze. These tools allow us to actually analyze important parameters such as turning radius, visibility, pedestrian conflict points, and real traffic behavior.”
Shah says Indian society has become dangerously accepting of poor standards in the name of “development” and “speed.” “Projects that should be stopped and redesigned get the green light because the political pressure to show development overrides every professional instinct to get it right,” he says.
Shah also believes that practical knowledge of construction and the importance of quality execution receive insufficient attention in architecture and planning faculties.
But Junmeet Singh Chauhan, architect and co-founder of Design Forum International (DFI), who has designed several high-profile public infrastructure projects, including Delhi’s ITO skywalk, offers a more optimistic perspective.
“Globally, many urban systems have developed strong case learning cultures, where cities continually document successes and failures to improve future outcomes,” he says. “India is now entering a phase where this institutional learning can become an integral part of governance and professional practice.”
He sees great scope for stronger partnerships between academia, public bodies and practitioners. “Students need greater exposure to the realities of city making. As our cities mature, design education will evolve as well – from being largely theoretical to becoming more interdisciplinary, systems-oriented, and implementation-aware.”
The power of popular anger
In many ways, says Chauhan, social media has become an extension of the public square. “Citizens are more aware, vocal and involved in conversations about urban life than ever before,” he says. “This in itself is a healthy sign of an urbanizing democracy on this scale,” he adds. “Rather than viewing public feedback as purely critical, it can also be viewed as an evolving layer of civic engagement. Cities ultimately belong to the people, and public engagement – whether through formal consultation or digital discourse – plays a crucial role in shaping accountability.”
Singh says every challenge is being discussed today It also generated deeper public awareness about “the kind of urban life we want to build for the future.” “This collective awareness is often the first step toward better cities,” he says.
Krishna Gupta agrees. “If the local community had not asked questions and shared the photos widely, the Mira-Bhiandar Bridge would have remained a dangerous cricket bat-shaped structure,” he says. “Only citizens can bring about change.”
