Every June, the city performs the same ritual. The first heavy rain arrives, the roads that looked passable in May dissolve into craters, the newspapers run photographs of scooters tipping into water-filled holes, and someone in authority promises that all potholes will be filled within a set number of days. By October the story has faded, and by the following June we are back where we started.
It is tempting to treat this as weather. It is not. Roads fail in the monsoon because the monsoon exposes everything that was done badly in the other eight months. Understanding why is the first step to asking better questions.
Why water and asphalt do not get along
Most of Mumbai's roads have historically been surfaced with asphalt, a mix of stone aggregate bound together with bitumen. Asphalt is cheap, quick to lay and comfortable to drive on. It also has a well-known weakness: water. When water seeps into cracks and sits there, it loosens the bond between bitumen and stone. Heavy vehicles then press on the weakened patch, the surface breaks, and a pothole forms. Each passing wheel makes it worse.
This is why drainage matters as much as the road surface. A well-built asphalt road with proper camber, sound edges and working drains can survive a Mumbai monsoon. A badly built one, laid on a weak base, with water standing on it for hours, will not. Much of what we call a pothole problem is really a water problem.
Contracts and the defect-liability period
The BMC maintains roughly 2,000 km of roads, and almost all road work is done by private contractors hired through tenders. Those contracts usually include a defect-liability period: a window of time, typically a few years for asphalt and longer for concrete, during which the contractor must repair any failure at their own cost.
In principle, this is a strong accountability tool. If a road laid last year develops potholes this monsoon, the contractor should fix it without charging the city, and repeated failures should count against them in future tenders. In practice, the tool is only as good as its enforcement. That depends on accurate records of which contractor laid which stretch and when, on engineers who inspect and certify the work honestly, and on the corporation being willing to penalise, blacklist or recover costs when a road fails early. Each of those links has been questioned at various times, including in audits and court proceedings.
There is also the problem of the calendar. Road work is supposed to finish before the monsoon, usually by the end of May, but tendering, approvals and traffic permissions routinely push work late. Roads laid in a hurry in the last weeks of May are more likely to fail in July.
The trenching problem
Below every road runs a small city of pipes and cables: water mains, sewers, gas lines, electricity cables, telecom fibre. Each of these belongs to a different agency or company, and each needs to dig up the road to lay, repair or upgrade its network.
Every trench is a wound in the road surface. Even when it is refilled and patched properly, the join between old and new surface is a weak point where water can enter. When it is refilled badly, with loose material and a thin layer of asphalt on top, it is practically a pothole in waiting. Coordinating utilities so that roads are not dug up weeks after being resurfaced has long been one of the city's hardest administrative problems, because the agencies involved do not all answer to the same authority.
The concrete bet and its trade-offs
In recent years, the BMC has committed to converting a large share of the city's roads from asphalt to cement concrete. The logic is straightforward: a well-laid concrete road does not form potholes the way asphalt does, lasts far longer, and needs far less monsoon maintenance.
The trade-offs are real, though, and worth understanding.
- Cost and disruption. Concrete roads cost considerably more to build and take longer to cure, which means long stretches of the city under construction at once.
- Utilities. Once a road is concrete, digging it up is expensive and difficult. This works only if utility ducts are built in advance so that cables and pipes can be laid without breaking the surface. Where that is not done, the concrete gets cut anyway, and patched sections fail.
- Road levels. Laying concrete over existing surfaces can raise road levels, so that rainwater flows off the road into ground-floor shops, homes and compounds that used to sit above it.
- Water and trees. Concrete does not absorb water, so runoff has to go somewhere, and it puts more pressure on drains. Arborists and residents have also raised concerns about concrete poured close to tree roots.
- Quality still matters. A concrete road with badly cut joints or an uneven surface can be as unpleasant as a potholed asphalt one, and repairing it is harder.
Concrete may well be the right choice for many of Mumbai's arterial roads. But it is not a magic wand, and it moves the problem from monsoon patching to construction quality and utility planning.
Drainage: the part nobody sees
Mumbai's storm-water drains were, for much of their history, designed to handle rainfall of around 25 mm an hour. After the devastating floods of July 2005, a major drainage upgrade programme aimed to raise that capacity to around 50 mm an hour, along with large pumping stations at outfalls such as Haji Ali and Irla. Those upgrades have helped, but heavy Mumbai downpours regularly exceed that rate, and when heavy rain coincides with high tide, outfalls into the sea cannot discharge freely.
Drains also need to be desilted every year before the monsoon, and clogged drains, especially smaller roadside ones, remain a common cause of waterlogging. Waterlogging, in turn, is what kills asphalt roads. It is all one system.
How accountability could work
None of this is unfixable. The ingredients of real accountability are well understood:
- Public road-level records. Which contractor laid each stretch, when, at what cost, and with what defect-liability period, published in a form residents can check.
- Independent quality checks on materials and finished work, with results published.
- Enforced defect liability, with contractors repairing failures at their own cost and repeat failures reflected in future bidding.
- Genuine coordination of utilities, so that roads are not dug up shortly after being relaid.
- Year-round drainage maintenance, not a single pre-monsoon sprint.
Some of these exist in partial form. What is usually missing is the transparency that lets residents see whether they are working.
How to report a pothole
When you spot a pothole, report it. The BMC's 1916 helpline takes civic complaints, and the corporation has in recent monsoons run dedicated pothole-reporting channels through its app and online complaint system; check the BMC portal at portal.mcgm.gov.in for what is current. A good report includes a precise location, a landmark, a photograph and, ideally, the ward. Note your complaint number, and follow up with the ward office if it goes quiet. If the road was recently relaid, it is worth asking whether it is still within its defect-liability period, and who the contractor was.
A single report rarely changes a system. Thousands of them, logged, numbered and followed up, create a record that is much harder to ignore. The monsoon will always find the weak points in Mumbai's roads. The question is whether we keep treating each July as a surprise, or start treating it as an audit.
