E-Paper
India’s urban blind spot: An ungoverned city beneath
As water turns toxic, tunnels flood, and sanitation workers die in sewers, a deeper failure surfaces—absence of underground planning and governance in cities
New Delhi
In Indore recently, sewage contaminated a drinking water pipeline running beneath a residential neighbourhood, killing at least 10 people. Officials blamed the tragedy on a cracked pipe; the angry residents complained of years of negligence.
However, the failure runs deeper—and remains largely unseen.
Above ground, Indian cities are governed by many layers of rules—land use is zoned, building heights regulated, setbacks enforced, and environmental clearances contested and monitored. But below ground, there is no such regime.
So, who governs the city below?
Pretty much no one.
Experts say this vacuum should no longer be ignored as Indian cities dig deeper than ever—for Metro tunnels and road underpasses, parking basements and malls, water pipelines, sewer lines, and utilities.
The absence of subterranean governance is increasingly leading to dangerous consequences. Drinking water turns toxic, as it did in Indore. Sewer gases kill sanitation workers in manholes with alarming regularity. Basements turn into death traps during heavy rains. And more often than not, every incident is dismissed as a local failure—mostly contractor negligence—while the deeper governance vacuum remains ignored.
“These incidents essentially reflect gaps in planning, governance and design related to subsurface infrastructure,” RK Goel, former chief scientist at CSIR-CIMFR , who specialises in underground space design and tunnelling.
Architect Manit Rastogi, founding partner at Morphogenesis, agrees that basement drownings and tunnel flooding in Delhi, groundwater contamination in Indore, and other such incidents are not freak accidents but predictable outcomes of a failure to govern underground space. “Indian urban planning remains largely two-dimensional. We regulate the surface but treat the underground as an unregulated frontier,” he says.
Indeed, in India, there is no national policy on underground space, no underground master plans, no legal recognition of subterranean zoning, no binding safety codes across utilities. And there is no single authority responsible for how subterranean space is allocated, layered or protected.
In most Indian cities, the responsibility for planning and building underground infrastructure is fragmented. Metro rail corporations, for example, plan their own tunnels. Road agencies build underpasses. Municipal corporations lay water and sewer lines. Power, gas and telecom utilities dig their own trenches. Each operates in silos, granting permissions with little assessment of cumulative risk or long-term capacity.
Globally, the underground matters
Worldwide, many cities have recognised that underground space is finite—and must be planned as carefully as surface land. Countries such as Singapore, the Netherlands and Finland have come up with elaborate master plans and 3D zoning frameworks to determine where different functions—like transportation tunnels, utilities, and storage, basements or energy infrastructure —can be located and even how deep they can go. These plans take into account geology, groundwater conditions, flood risk and future demand before space is allocated.
Helsinki’s Underground Master Plan, approved in 2010, has become a benchmark. It maps the entire municipal area in three dimensions, reserves underground corridors for future infrastructure, and treats the subsurface as an important urban asset. All public agencies and private developers are legally required to align projects with this framework.
Similarly, Singapore’s 2019 Underground Master Plan, prepared by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, zones underground depths for utilities, data centres and transport, freeing up surface land for housing and public spaces in the land-scarce city-state.
“India has no equivalent comprehensive framework. Regulations governing underground construction are largely limited to individual buildings,” says AK Jain, former commissioner (planning) at the Delhi Development Authority.
Although state town planning acts and municipal master plans mention underground infrastructure—often guided by the 2015 Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation (URDPFI) guidelines—they mostly focus on surface land use and two-dimensional planning. They do not provide a dedicated framework for subsurface governance, such as 3D zoning, depth-based allocation, or underground master plans.
Even major urban programmes such as the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) 2.0, launched in 2021, focus largely on upgrading surface infrastructure and improving GIS-based utility mapping—creating digital inventories of water supply, sewerage, and drainage assets such as pipes, valves, and junctions
In the absence of underground governance, authorities repeatedly resort to engineering fixes, attempting to correct systemic planning failures through design tweaks and repairs.
The illusion of quick fixes
It is no surprise, then, that road tunnels in Indian cities frequently flood during the monsoon. In Pragati Maidan Tunnel in Delhi, waterlogging has repeatedly brought traffic to a halt. The Public Works Department (PWD) recently announced a fresh round of repairs—structural fixes, waterproofing, drainage upgrades and system restoration—to address water ingress and ensure “operational reliability.”
Experts say in many Indian cities, tunnels and basements are built below natural drainage paths or adjacent to already overloaded stormwater drains. During intense rainfall—now more frequent and erratic due to climate change—water follows the path of least resistance: into the underground.
What does not help, experts point out, is the absence of integrated underground mapping and a failure to understand interactions between underground systems.
“In fact, this is one of the most underestimated risks in Indian urbanism. Underground systems do not fail independently. They fail at points of interaction. When basements intersect drainage paths, when tunnels alter groundwater movement, or when utilities overlap without hierarchy, risk accumulates silently. These interactions are rarely mapped or analysed together,” says Dikshu Kukreja, an architect and managing principal, CP Kukreja Architects (CPKA). “As underground construction accelerates in dense urban cores, the probability of cascading failures increases, often surfacing during extreme weather events such as monsoons”.
A warning unheeded
Experts have long warned of the risks of neglecting underground planning.
A 2022 National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) report, Underground Urbanism: Re-imagining the Role of Underground Spaces for India’s Urban Future, echoed these concerns, calling for a more strategic and integrated use of subsurface space through policy, planning and innovation.
“In spatial policies and other strategic plans, underground spaces are often overlooked due to a lack of awareness and understanding by policymakers, decision-makers and planners — on how these spaces can assist in achieving policy goals and contribute to achieving sustainable development goals ( SDGs),” said the report.
In his 2012 book, Underground Infrastructures: Planning, Design, and Construction, which deals with the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of underground structures Goel, along with Bhawani Singh and Jian Zhao, argues if planned and governed well, underground space can ease land scarcity in dense cities by housing transport, utilities, parking, and storage below ground, freeing surface land for housing, green spaces and other public use.
“There is a need for harmony between surface and underground facilities. Cities must plan the subsurface as an integral part of urban space, considering environment, water, safety and future uses from the outset. Treating underground infrastructure as an afterthought only creates conflict, risk and long-term urban failure,” Goel says.
Needed a deeper vision
Institutional fragmentation, not technical capability, is why Indian cities have failed to plan and manage underground infrastructure, says Kukreja.
GIFT City in Gujarat is an example of what coordinated planning under a single city-level authority can achieve. While it does not have a dedicated underground master plan, the greenfield development has integrated underground infrastructure into its overall master plan. This includes a multi-utility tunnel stretching over 16 km that houses power, water, sewage, telecom, district cooling and waste systems, allowing most services to operate without repeated road digging. The tunnel network is managed through a central SCADA system that monitors and controls services in real time.
“The tunnel has solved a chronic problem Indian cities face—the constant digging up of roads and built-up areas for repairs and utility upgrades,” says Anil Parmar, vice president (engineering) at GIFT City. “The tunnel is up to eight metres wide and 11 metres deep, large enough for a small maintenance vehicle to pass through. We regularly receive officials from state governments and municipal corporations across the country who come to study how it works. But this model can be practically implemented effectively only in greenfield cities.”
So, what is a realistic first step for legacy cities like Delhi or Mumbai?
“The priority must be comprehensive subsurface mapping and data integration,” says Kukreja. This, he adds, includes three-dimensional mapping of utilities, geology, groundwater, and existing underground structures, shared across agencies. “Once a common knowledge base exists, governance mechanisms, regulations, and underground master plans can evolve meaningfully. Without data and integration, any regulatory framework will remain superficial”.
Rastogi agrees, saying “India also needs a national subsurface database, made mandatory for building approvals.”
That need becomes more urgent as cities densify and spread, says Jain. “There is nothing wrong with cities digging deeper to accommodate growth—it is even desirable. But they must now develop dedicated subsurface master plans to ensure underground space is used safely, efficiently and sustainably.”
