Indore was crowned India’s cleanest city in August 2025 for the eighth consecutive year, a feat proudly announced on the Indore Municipal Corporation’s website. Five months later in January, water contaminated by a sewage leak in Bhagirathpura led to at least 10 deaths and more than 270 residents being hospitalised.
This contrast between the celebration of rankings and deaths due to poisoned water captures, with grim precision, how spectacle matters more than function in Indian urban governance.
The municipal infrastructure – water supply, sewage lines, public transport, garbage trucks, municipal schools and hospitals – form the creaking backbone on which daily urban life depends in India. But they are being hollowed out, underfunded, and allowed to crumble even as budgets swell and new schemes are enthusiastically announced.
The budgets of Indian civic bodies have swelled over the past decade:the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagar Palike announced a budget of Rs 19,927.08 crore for 2025-’26, up 51.95% from the previous year, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi passed a budget of Rs 17,583 crore for 2026-’27 while the Indore Municipal Corporation’s budget for the past year was Rs 8,236.98.
Yet, the returns on these expenditures are dismal. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’s Municipal Performance Index showed that most cities struggled to meet even modest benchmarks – the highest performing was Indore. The index, launched...
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