India has Perfected the Art of Building Things Nobody Uses

 By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan

The Republic of Ribbons

India has perfected the art of building things nobody uses

A RAILWAY STATION in Bhopal has spent three years waiting for a train the way some men wait for a bus that was cancelled in a timetable nobody bothered to publish. The Nishtapura station has platforms, a foot-over-bridge and lighting fit for a much busier life. It has never had a passenger. Locals have found a use for it anyway: as a backdrop for film shoots, the closest thing to a plot this station will ever host.

Nishtapura is not an anomaly. It is a species. Call it Ghost Infrastructure: concrete, steel and taxpayer rupees assembled into the shape of progress, then left to stand there, looking the part, doing nothing. India builds these with a fluency that would be admirable if it were not so expensive. The formula is reliable. A minister arrives, a ribbon is cut, a drone films the ribbon being cut, and then everyone goes home—the minister to the next ribbon, the asset to a long retirement it never earned.

From haunted station to national habit

Multiply Nishtapura by a few thousand and the picture becomes less quirky and more alarming. The Mumbai Monorail, a genuinely futuristic-looking piece of engineering, has swallowed more than 4,000 crore rupees ($480m) and now carries a tenth of the passengers it promised, at a speed that flatters neither its designers nor the traffic it was meant to beat. It also catches fire with a regularity that would be comic in a cheaper system: a ten-month shutdown in 2017, an eight-month one pencilled in for 2025. The projected loss for 2025-26 alone is 460 crore rupees, a figure that exists mainly to be compared, mournfully, with the cost of something else that could have been built instead.

This is the sunk-cost trap in its purest form. Officials cannot easily admit the Monorail was a mistake, because admitting it was a mistake means admitting the money is gone—so instead they spend more money proving it wasn't, which is how sunk costs become bottomless ones.

The pattern travels well. India's regional-airport scheme, UDAN, promised to let the aspiring middle class hop between tier-two cities the way Londoners hop on the Tube. A government audit found that 52% of the routes awarded never got off the ground, so to speak, and only 7% survived once the subsidy that had been keeping them airborne was withdrawn. Airports in Azamgarh, Aligarh, Moradabad, Takut, Shravasti and Kushinagar now sit "operational" chiefly in the sense that stray dogs operate freely across their runways, interrupted only by the occasional VIP charter, arriving to admire the terminal it made possible.

Ghosts in the machine

Where the Monorail and the airports are ghosts you can see, a second generation haunts the spreadsheets. Telangana's payroll turned up 7,000 ghost employees; Madhya Pradesh found tens of thousands of the dead and retired still dutifully collecting salaries, a workforce more reliable in the afterlife than most are in the office. Toilets built under sanitation drives, minus the inconvenient detail of a water connection, have found a second career as storage sheds—success, on paper, measured in taps installed rather than water that ever flowed through them.

The saddest ghosts wear school uniforms. Between 2014 and 2024 roughly 94,000-100,000 government schools closed, pushing 8.6m children into private schools their families can ill afford. Meanwhile a 2024 government audit in Maharashtra found six "active" institutions that had, in fact, been locked and empty for years, their record books cheerfully inventing staff and students to account for 1.62 crore rupees that had gone somewhere else. In Delhi, operating theatres sit idle for want of coordination while patients in the same public-hospital system sleep on corridor floors—proof that scarcity and waste can share a postcode.

The opportunity cost of a ribbon

The economics here is not exotic. Every rupee poured into an asset nobody uses is a rupee that didn't repair a school roof, staff a clinic or, for that matter, fund the safety clearance that might let a train finally stop at Nishtapura. The Monorail's annual losses alone could have kept open thousands of the schools now serving as, per local reports, cow sheds and grain stores. Ghost infrastructure is not merely wasteful; it is an opportunity cost with a ribbon tied round it.

Young Indians appear to have noticed. The recent "Chalo Sansad" protests in Delhi drew crowds tired of being asked to admire buildings rather than use them, and unimpressed by a jobs market that photographs better than it performs.

Fixing this does not require new economics, only old discipline: audit projects for genuine demand before, not after, laying the first brick; verify with boots on the ground rather than dashboards in the cloud, since a dashboard has never once caught a ghost employee; punish officials who report completion in place of function; and let citizens use freedom-of-information law as it was intended, as an audit tool rather than a formality.

None of this is glamorous. It will not produce a ribbon, a drone shot or a minister's smile. But a country's progress ought to be measured by lives improved, not monuments erected—and on that measure, India has, for some years now, been counting the wrong things.