In a sweltering summer afternoon in Mumbai, commuters celebrate the reopening of the Gokhale Bridge. The bridge promises to finally reconnect East and West Andheri, after months of traffic snarls and commuter woes; if you are familiar with Mumbai, you know what traffic jams and outlandish commutes are. As the bridge is unveiled, joy quickly turns to confusion, confusion into disbelief, and disbelief upon anger as drivers find a six-foot gap separating them from the adjacent Barfiwala Flyover: the much-awaited promised connection that remains only that, a promise. 

This unfathomable feat of engineering humour ignited a mediatic firestorm and a spectacular blame game, which drifted from terming the bridge an “engineering marvel” from one side, to a “corrupt regime’s” marvel from the other, to a generic ‘inconvenience regretted’ in the boardings now enclosing it. 

This story, an old one, is well-known and now endlessly retold. 

Repeatedly reported through many clever headlines with charming architectural undertones ―like “Bridging the Gap to Nowhere” or “A Tale of Misalignment”―, wherein one in particular rightly brings up an interesting reflection: “A Bridge Stranger Than Any Fiction”. Rightly so, because fiction by definition entails something that stretches the limits of reality by weaving accounts that often seem implausible; yet, the Gokhale Bridge case not only blurs this line, but nearly demonstrates we inhabit a world of fiction altogether. The incident is so improbable, so ludicrous, that contextually seems predictable and likely. Because, of course, this is not an isolated mishap; is the manifestation of a larger phenomenon that defies conventional understandings of what the built environment is or, rather, presumably should be. A constructed imagination that is almost too strange to believe while being all too real.

This broader fiction of infrastructural over-eagerness and error, is testament to a pendular culture of development that is both energetic and futile. Yet, forget Mumbai. Forget the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, which after a few weeks of inauguration started to crack, or the newly opened Mumbai Coastal Road Tunnels leaking before the monsoon came. Forget these major scandals concentrated in the economic capital of India. This is a widespread fiction. 

Take Bihar, for example, where the state has witnessed the collapse of at least ten bridges between June and July 2024 alone, each with its own engineering punch line. 

In Araria District, for instance, a newly constructed bridge over the Bakra River crumbled before it could even be inaugurated (the foundation failed, likely due to unexpected river discharge). In Siwan District on the other hand, a 40-year-old bridge over the Gandak River gave way as its central pier collapsed (on account of poor maintenance and silting). In Motihari, East Champaran, a minor bridge under construction succumbed to the monsoon (after the contractor decided to proceed despite the rains) while in Kishanganj another bridge built in 2011 over the Mariya River collapsed when its pier was undermined by scouring and strong currents (seemingly unpredictable ones). Similarly, in Jhanjharpur, Madhubani District, a 75-meter-long bridge under construction since 2021 saw its scaffolding give way (as another victim of seasonal misjudgement). 

The list goes on and on.

Perhaps we could blame the monsoon; an annual predictable event that catches us off guard every year, and that we wait for to repair infrastructures that fail repeatedly. However, the point here is not to point fingers or expound the guilty; accountability is not a significant part of this fiction anyways. Neither is to highlight bureaucratic negligence, contracting corruption, engineering incompetence, or even propose a monsoon conspiracy set up against civilization. The point perhaps, is to suggest how we have invented our world through infrastructures that are unintendedly transitory and erroneous.

Fictions of development and progress emblematic not only of India but many other regions of the Global South (and the world), and that arise from a web of very confusing processes. A couple of culprits ―out of many― are nevertheless clear at home-ground: the L1 paradigm and, you guessed it, institutionalised political vanity. 

Now, we know the L1 system of public tendering ―which largely governs public infrastructures in India― arose as a well-intended policy to reduce government spending while confiding in well-established players. The grand idea is to prioritise the cheapest tenders while benchmarking a yearly turnover for proponents in order to assign contracts. However, despite its benevolent origins, this policy has come at the expense of quality, whereas agencies capable of demonstrating sufficient capital influx do not necessarily have the expertise or intent to construct adequately, while being devoid of any incentive to construct anything more than the basic of the basic. It is unfortunately a numbers game that incentivises cutting corners and a ‘chalta hai’ demeanour. 

The latter is coupled with a political culture wherein infrastructures are intimately associated and patronized by political figures or parties, which often champion projects or accelerate construction processes in order to claim infrastructures as their legacy. You see, vanity produces infrastructures. This, of course, not only tends to sidestep necessary considerations, studies, or designs in order to meet election deadlines, but also weaponizes infrastructures in spectacular political rivalries that are not that different from your everyday gully cricket brawls. Thus, we construct our cities in disconnected fragments, responding to the simulated need of the hour.

Evidently enough, examples as the Gokhale Bridge not only embody a failed connection between two fragmented places, but a failed connection to a coherent environment. A failed connection between what we promise ourselves and what we actually deliver. An incredible feat of fiction that, strangely enough, is our lived reality. The question that remains then, is for how long is this fiction sustainable and till when will we be comfy living in it. Because as we race towards a near future of so called ‘smart cities’ and bullet trains, perhaps it would be wise to slow down and ensure our foundations, both literal and metaphorical, are properly built. Otherwise, we might find ourselves perpetually stuck in traffic, waiting for a bridge that leads nowhere.