Gurugram’s curse: Milked by the state that ignores its plight
The civic collapse of Gurugram is not an overnight disaster. It is a pattern of neglect, apathy, dereliction, and malfeasance, unleashed year after year
Gurugram, still popular as Gurgaon, fuels Haryana’s economy. Yet when the city sinks into rainwater, chokes on toxic air, or drinks poisoned groundwater, the state retreats into silence.
The betrayal is not just civic, it is political. The city was meant to be India’s calling card to the world, with 250+ India-headquartered Fortune 500 companies, 190 crore apartments, gleaming towers, and sky-scraping aspirations. The Millennium City embodied the promise of a rising India. Instead, now it is a tragic spectacle of incompetence, indifference, and incapability. Today, it has become a punchline, its monsoon-swamped streets and crumbling flyovers serving as emblems of civic collapse in globally viral visuals.
The images from recent weeks were a damning indictment — a teenager electrocuted in floodwaters near Sector 90; a cave-in swallowing cars on the Delhi-Gurugram Expressway; flyovers, less than a decade old, showing alarming cracks; arterial roads vanishing under water; commuters trapped for hours; Cyber Hub, Cyber Park or Udyog Vihar, the supposed symbols of corporate confidence, becoming unreachable, inaccessible. This is not just a story of potholes or puddles. It is a deeper betrayal by the very state that milks it yet abandons it.
The ridicule was swift and global. The Guardian called Gurugram “a city drowning in its own ambition.” Bloomberg ran a photo essay titled “India’s showcase city can’t beat the rain”. Social media made the city a global punchline. Someone wrote that a city cannot claim to be futuristic when its foundations are rotting in water and indifference.
The city’s rise has been primarily a private-sector miracle. Maruti, DLF, and, later on, other developers carved a patchwork of a global city out of farmland, wooing MNCs with proximity to Delhi’s airport and a promise of modern infrastructure. The government happily scaled back governance, content with raking in revenues.
The State’s abdication of responsibility is now catching up — not just the monsoon, but every spell of rain makes death traps out of drains. Roads collapse within mere single-digit years of construction. The Bandhwari landfill, a festering, toxic mountain of untreated waste, leaks poison into the Aravalli aquifers. Gurugram’s air quality ensures that it routinely shows up in the rankings of the worst-polluted cities.
Global investors scrolling through images of their backend operations or supply chains, submerged in waist-deep water, no longer look at the city as an attractive destination; they look at it as a risky proposition.
The civic collapse of Gurugram is not an overnight disaster. It is a pattern of neglect, apathy, dereliction, and malfeasance, unleashed year after year. “Gurujam” entered the popular lexicon in 2016. A 20-hour traffic paralysis after heavy rain left thousands stranded. In 2017, after the Bandhwari landfill fire, toxic smoke blanketed the city. Residents reported respiratory distress; the State promised “permanent closure.” 2018 saw a repeat of the monsoon chaos, with newly built underpasses becoming drowning pits. The year after, committees looking into Aravalli encroachment flagged illegal mining and leachate contaminating groundwater. Over 2020 to 2025, the city saw toxic pollution of air and water, crumbling infrastructure unable to stand up to the monsoon, and a growing waste problem.
Every international headline about Gurugram’s collapse chips away at India’s credibility as an investment hub. When media reports cover the city’s floods or waste mountains, it is not just a local embarrassment; it becomes a national one.
Gurugram competes not only with Noida or Mumbai but also with global destinations like Dubai and Singapore. To keep investment flowing, it needs more than shiny office parks. It needs drains that don’t flow onto roads, flyovers that don’t cave in, and waste that doesn’t poison citizens. Instead, what investors see is a single window that collects revenue but shirks responsibility — a state government in Chandigarh that markets Gurugram as a jewel but abandons it during floods, and a civic administration that tries to pass off its failures as an act of God.
Leaders need to be reminded that the city’s mess didn’t happen overnight, but action is urgently needed for a sustainable solution. The most conspicuous symbol of Gurugram’s betrayal is the Bandhwari landfill. Over the years, it has metastasised into a toxic mountain leaching cancerous chemicals into groundwater. Experts warn of a looming public health crisis, with leachate contaminating wells and agricultural land. The floods are humiliating enough, but what lies beneath is even more toxic. Mountains of untreated waste are a festering wound at the edge of the Aravallis. Black leachate flows into groundwater, poisoning aquifers. The government responds with denial and empty promises of “waste-to-energy plants” that never materialise.
In most global cities, waste is segregated, recycled, and treated scientifically. In Gurugram, it is dumped, burned, and stowed away in the Aravallis. Residents wake up breathless from the smog generated by burning waste. And yet, the political establishment treats these as inconveniences to be managed, not an existential crisis to be solved.
Gurugram’s survival depends on urgent, structural reform, not token patchwork. Best practices from global cities can serve as a template, such as Singapore’s waste-to-energy plants with strict compliance, and incorporation of plasma waste disposal techniques; Tokyo’s underground drainage and flood control systems; Beijing’s enforceable limits on construction dust and industrial emissions; and participatory urban governance, where residents, RWAs, and independent experts co-design city plans, as is the practice in Seoul and Barcelona.
Closer home, Noida has better waste management, unflooded arterial roads, and relatively more responsive administration. If Gurugram fails to match or exceed these standards, capital and talent will migrate across the Yamuna. It is a wake-up call to those who think it is their blessing to be rulers of cash-rich Gurugram.
At its core, the city’s tragedy is one of a broken contract. Citizens and corporations give Haryana their wealth, their energy, their votes, and their trust. In return, they get potholes, poison, platitudes, and a Millennium City run on medieval governance. Unless the state corrects course, Gurugram’s future will be as leaky as its present.
Ashish Dua is member, All India Congress Committee and a resident of Gurugram. The views expressed are personal
