India is laying down highways and bridges at a record pace and watching too many of them fall down.
A June 27, 2026 analysis spotlighting the country's "infrastructure revolution" warns that record-setting construction is being shadowed by recurring bridge collapses, and argues that India now urgently needs a national infrastructure safety policy.
The numbers behind the warning are stark: roughly 170 bridge collapses between 2021 and 2025, killing about 202 people and injuring 441, according to compiled reporting.
The scale of the problem
The failures are not confined to one region. Bihar has recorded the most, with about 26 collapses over the period including a stretch in 2024 when the state saw two dozen bridges fail in roughly three months. The most symbolic case is the under-construction cable-stayed bridge between Sultanganj and Agwani over the Ganga, which has partially collapsed three separate times in three years.
Gujarat logged around 16 collapses. The deadliest recent disaster there was the Gambhira Bridge over the Mahi River in Padra, Vadodara district a structure built in 1985 that gave way on July 9, 2025, killing at least 22 people. In Maharashtra, an aging iron bridge over the Indrayani River near Pune collapsed under crowd load in mid-2025, leaving four dead and scores injured. Investigations have repeatedly pointed to the same culprits: deferred maintenance, weak inspection regimes, ageing structures, overloading, and gaps in construction quality.
The official response
The collapses have triggered defensive action at the state level. After the Gambhira disaster, Gujarat inspected more than 1,800 bridges, fully closing about 20 and partially restricting 113 to heavy vehicles, while suspending engineers and ordering a high-level probe. The state's Roads and Buildings department also awarded a roughly ₹166 crore contract to Mangalam Construction Company to build a replacement bridge alongside the collapsed Gambhira span, targeted for completion in 2026. Critics, however, argue these are reactive, piecemeal fixes and that the absence of a unified national framework for inspection, load monitoring, and accountability is the deeper failure.
The other India: engineering on a grand scale
The collapses sit awkwardly beside India's genuine engineering triumphs. The flagship is Atal Setu (the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link), a six-lane, roughly 21.8 km sea crossing about 16.5 km of it over open water built for around ₹17,840 crore and opened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2024. It is India's longest sea bridge and ranks among the world's longest, cutting the Mumbai–Navi Mumbai trip from over 90 minutes to about 30. The contrast is the heart of the story: a country capable of world-class megastructures is still losing rural and mid-sized bridges to preventable failures.
The challenge for 2026, observers say, is to make the safety of the ordinary bridge match the ambition of the showcase one.
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