As water turns toxic, tunnels flood, and sanitation workers die in sewers, a deeper failure surfaces—one rooted in the absence of underground planning and governance in Indian cities.

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When sewage seeped into a drinking water pipeline in Indore recently, killing at least 10 people, authorities pointed to a cracked pipe. Residents, furious and grieving, spoke of years of neglect. Both explanations were true—and both missed the larger problem.

The real failure lay beneath the ground.

Above the surface, Indian cities are tightly regulated. Land use is zoned, building heights are capped, setbacks enforced, and environmental clearances debated, challenged, and monitored. But below the surface, where water pipes, sewer lines, tunnels, basements, cables, and drains criss-cross in dense urban layers, there is no comparable system of planning or control.

So who governs the city below?

In practice, almost no one.

As Indian cities dig deeper than ever—building Metro tunnels, road underpasses, basement parking, shopping complexes, sewage networks, and utility corridors—the lack of underground governance is no longer an abstract concern. It is producing visible, and often fatal, consequences.

Drinking water turns toxic, as in Indore. Sewer gases kill sanitation workers inside manholes with disturbing regularity. Basements become death traps during intense rainfall. Road tunnels flood every monsoon. Yet each incident is treated as an isolated failure—contractor negligence, faulty design, poor maintenance—while the structural vacuum that enables these disasters remains unaddressed.

“These incidents essentially reflect gaps in planning, governance, and design related to subsurface infrastructure,” says R K Goel, former chief scientist at CSIR-CIMFR and an expert in underground space design and tunnelling.

Architect Manit Rastogi, founding partner at Morphogenesis, agrees. He argues that basement drownings in Delhi, tunnel flooding, groundwater contamination, and sewer deaths are not freak accidents but predictable outcomes of a two-dimensional approach to urban planning. “We regulate the surface meticulously, but treat the underground as an unregulated frontier,” he says.

A City Without Rules Below Ground

India has no national policy on underground space. There are no underground master plans, no legal recognition of subterranean zoning, no binding safety codes that cut across utilities, and no single authority responsible for allocating, layering, or protecting underground space.

Instead, responsibility is fragmented. Metro rail corporations plan their own tunnels. Road agencies build underpasses. Municipal bodies lay water and sewer lines. Power, gas, and telecom companies dig trenches independently. Each agency operates in its own silo, issuing permissions with little assessment of cumulative risk, geological constraints, or long-term capacity.

The result is a chaotic subsurface where pipes intersect drains, tunnels alter groundwater flow, and basements intrude into natural drainage paths—often without anyone fully understanding how these systems interact.

Lessons From Elsewhere

Globally, many cities have recognised that underground space is finite and valuable—and must be planned as carefully as land above ground.

Singapore, Finland, and the Netherlands have developed sophisticated underground master plans and three-dimensional zoning frameworks. These determine not just where underground structures can be built, but how deep, for what purpose, and under what geological and hydrological conditions.

Helsinki’s Underground Master Plan, approved in 2010, is widely regarded as a benchmark. It maps the city in three dimensions, reserves underground corridors for future infrastructure, and legally requires all public agencies and private developers to align projects with this framework.

Singapore followed with its Underground Master Plan in 2019, zoning subsurface depths for utilities, transport, data centres, and energy infrastructure—freeing up scarce surface land for housing and public spaces.

“India has no equivalent comprehensive framework,” says A K Jain, former commissioner (planning) at the Delhi Development Authority. “Our regulations are largely limited to individual buildings and do not address subsurface space as an integrated urban system.”

While state town planning laws and master plans mention underground infrastructure—often guided by the 2015 Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation (URDPFI) guidelines—the focus remains overwhelmingly two-dimensional. There is no provision for depth-based zoning, subsurface land-use allocation, or long-term underground capacity planning.

Even flagship programmes like AMRUT 2.0 emphasise surface upgrades and GIS-based utility mapping rather than integrated underground governance.

The Illusion of Engineering Fixes

In the absence of systemic planning, authorities often respond to underground failures with technical patchwork.

Take the Pragati Maidan Tunnel in Delhi, which has repeatedly flooded during the monsoon. Each episode triggers fresh rounds of repairs—waterproofing, drainage upgrades, structural fixes—promising “operational reliability.” Yet the core issue remains: tunnels and basements are often built below natural drainage paths or adjacent to already overloaded stormwater systems.

As climate change intensifies rainfall patterns, water follows the path of least resistance—straight into underground spaces.

What makes matters worse is the lack of integrated underground mapping. “Underground systems do not fail independently. They fail at points of interaction,” says Dikshu Kukreja, managing principal at CP Kukreja Architects. “When basements intersect drainage paths, when tunnels alter groundwater movement, when utilities overlap without hierarchy, risk accumulates silently.”

These interactions are rarely studied holistically. The failure only becomes visible during extreme events—monsoons, floods, or infrastructure collapses.

Warnings Long Ignored

Experts have been flagging these risks for years. A 2022 National Institute of Disaster Management report, Underground Urbanism: Re-imagining the Role of Underground Spaces for India’s Urban Future, warned that subsurface spaces are routinely overlooked by policymakers and planners, despite their critical role in achieving sustainable development goals.

In his book Underground Infrastructures: Planning, Design, and Construction, Goel argues that well-governed underground space can ease land scarcity by housing transport, utilities, parking, and storage below ground—freeing surface land for housing, green spaces, and public use.

“There must be harmony between surface and underground facilities,” he says. “Treating underground infrastructure as an afterthought only creates conflict, risk, and long-term urban failure.”

What Can Be Done?

The problem, experts argue, is not a lack of technical capability but institutional fragmentation.

GIFT City in Gujarat offers a glimpse of what coordinated planning can achieve. Though it lacks a formal underground master plan, its greenfield development integrated subsurface infrastructure from the outset. A 16-km multi-utility tunnel houses power, water, sewage, telecom, district cooling, and waste systems—eliminating the need for constant road digging. The network is centrally monitored through a SCADA system.

“This model works because planning, ownership, and operation sit with a single authority,” says Anil Parmar, vice president (engineering) at GIFT City. But he acknowledges that such integration is far harder to retrofit into legacy cities like Delhi or Mumbai.

For existing cities, experts say the first step must be comprehensive subsurface mapping. This means three-dimensional mapping of utilities, geology, groundwater, and existing underground structures—shared across all agencies.

“Without a common knowledge base, any regulatory framework will remain superficial,” Kukreja says.

Rastogi adds that India needs a national subsurface database, made mandatory for building approvals.

As cities densify and dig deeper, Jain warns, underground planning can no longer be optional. “There is nothing wrong with cities going underground to accommodate growth,” he says. “But without dedicated subsurface master plans, we are simply building invisible cities without rules—and paying the price in lives.”

The tragedies surfacing across Indian cities are not random failures. They are symptoms of an ungoverned world beneath our feet—one that urgently demands vision, coordination, and accountability.