Why do potholes never stop emerging, and what prevents timely repairs?

The word “pothole” undersells the problem. It captures none of the frustration, the hazard, and the hardship that craters, holes, and depressions inflict on India’s roads.

Poor, unstructured paving explains why potholes arise in the first place. Without drainage beneath the road surface, accumulated water punctures the surface and pulls it inward, leaving large holes behind.

Structured, engineered paving would prevent this: water would flow through the surface each time it rains, instead of tearing it apart. Building such a road, though, serves neither the government nor the contractor.

A road can be repaved only once it has broken down, and that breakdown gives the contractor repeat business. Each repaving that goes down on top of the last raises the odds that potholes will return, so in India, potholes breed more potholes. That is the first cause.

The second cause is a problem of ownership and coordination. In Indian cities, every government department capable of building a road builds one. Central bodies such as the NHAI and the PWD build roads, state governments build roads, and local bodies such as a municipal corporation’s road department or a gram sabha build roads too. Special purpose vehicles build roads. Inter-government bodies build roads. Development authorities such as the MMRDA build roads, and so do port trusts and the military.

A citizen who wants a contractor held responsible for a pothole must first identify who that contractor answers to, a task that is nearly impossible given how many agencies share the ground. Even a citizen who manages that must then coordinate with other agencies to split the cost and responsibility of the repair, a coordination problem that only grows harder as more agencies tangle together. That tangle is how India governs its roads today.

In Lucknow, some of these potholes have grown into craters, a symptom local reporting has tied to entrenched corruption in the city’s road contracts.