June 16, 2025 ☼ The Intersection ☼ public policy

This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint.

Over the past few weeks heavy rains caused flooding in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Gurgaon, Guwahati and several other cities. Newly inaugurated metro stations, upscale gated communities, technology parks and arterial roads were flooded, causing economic losses and adding to the chaos that characterises India’s urban spaces. A couple of years ago, an online survey found that over 90% of the respondents across the country suffer from water-logging. 

It is easy and correct to attribute the problem to climate change, rapid urbanisation and corruption. There is another reason: India does not have enough civil engineers. We are expanding cities and building a massive amount of infrastructure without trained, skilled and experienced engineers necessary to do a good job. We get highways with dangerous corners, roads that get jammed, flyovers that get delayed and, yes, flooding in metro stations, underpasses and residential car parks. It is not an exaggeration to say that India is facing a civil engineering shortage crisis. 

The Indian Roads Congress, a venerable national standards body, has laid out standards for roads, pavements, pedestrian bridges, storm water drains and dozens of other things. After going through these standards I tried to recall instances where they are actually followed. Other than a few New Delhi neighbourhoods and some parts of Panaji, I do not think there is any place in the country that is built in compliance with the standards. 

It does not cost much to build roads to those standards. A road that has the recommended gradient will drain water away and resist water-logging. It only requires the engineers who designed the road network to pay attention to watershed, and the contractors to surface the road to maintain the slope. If your road is flooded it is because either the engineer or the contractor — quite likely both — missed this most basic design lesson. Road medians and speed-breakers are installed without any consideration of their effect on water or pedestrian movement. Few traffic police officers have heard about or care about the Indian Roads Congress and its recommendations. 

While local governments do hire engineers, the people in the position are technical bureaucrats rather than practising civil engineers. The private sector, for its part, has long been complaining of a shortage in skilled manpower. Why is there a shortage? 

Well, most people who graduated with a civil engineering degree in the past three decades do not do civil engineering. The great Indian IT boom is the ‘Dutch disease’ has claimed a large number of them. The remaining ones are in government, consulting and managerial roles in the fast-growing economy. Very few remain in the civil engineering profession. In response to these trends, engineering colleges across the country have not expanded — and in some cases cut down — the number of civil engineering seats relative to computer science and electronics branches. Civil is not a preferred branch for most students, and is seen as a halfway house to a career in the IT sector. We do not have accurate data, but of the 1.5 million or so engineers that graduate every year, around 300,000 are from civil engineers, 80% of who leave the field. Only 60,000 pursue a career in civil engineering in India and abroad. Effectively, India thus produces fewer civil engineers than doctors. 

There is also the problem of quality. Because so many graduates end up working in IT, it is hard to find good civil engineering faculty, resulting in weakness in the quality of civil engineering graduates.The overall effect is one where there is an acute shortage of good civil engineers. This cascades down the infrastructure sector: without enough engineers to supervise the work of technicians and labourers the overall output remain sub-optimal. Shoddy quality, poor workmanship and project delays are covered up by corruption. 

The good news is that unlike grand problems like climate change, urbanisation pattern and corruption, public policy can help increase the supply of good civil engineers. The Union and State governments should collaborate with the infrastructure industry to set up civil engineering centres of excellence in state universities in Tier-2 cities.* Good faculty from IITs and top-tier engineering colleges can be seconded to these centres to rapidly build up capacity. Merely raising the profile of civil engineering — through industry collaboration and campus placements — can channel talent into the field. 

The publicity around the extraordinary Chenab Bridge has rekindled public interest in the field. G Madhavi Latha, a key member of the design team, wrote that although her role was exaggerated in the media, she is extremely happy that many fathers had written to her saying that they wanted their daughters emulate her, and that young kids have expressed an interest in a career in civil engineering. 

This is an opportune moment for India to invent in building a strong civil engineering base. AI can easily replace coders, but it will be a while before it can replace civil engineers and masons.

There are many more The Intersection columns here

© Copyright 2003-2024. Nitin Pai. All Rights Reserved.