Tikender Singh Panwar
This is becoming normal in India: No accountability. From the pothole that killed a schoolgirl in UP and the tap water that poisoned infants in Indore to the exam paper leak for the third consecutive year, a new normal is emerging. And is there a chance of anyone being punished or these occurrences? The answer is: No.
Is this an unrelated governance failure? No, it is the visible symptom of a nation-state that has the machinery for delivering public services, but that machinery is answerable to no one. The guarantee to provide basic infrastructure or secure exam papers it is not just the administrative inefficiency or failure of corrupt officials or an institutional defect, but also a superstructural reality.
Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said: “The systemic failure to hold power accountable can be understood as an exercise in cultural hegemony.” This is a mechanism through which the ruling political and administrative elite uses social norms, legal rituals and institutional diffusion to manufacture public consent for its own catastrophic failures.
What is the anatomy of non-accountability?
Between 2020 and 2024, potholes killed 9,438 people on roads — a 53% rise over five years, with fatalities climbing annually to reach 2,385 in 2024 alone. UP accounted for more than half of this death toll. Likewise, let us talk about water. In the 12 months leading to January 2026, because of sewage contamination, 5,500 people fell sick and 34 died across just 26 cities in 22 states, including 16 capitals. Indore, the cleanest city and modelled as a ‘Smart City,’ saw raw sewage killing around 16 people. And what happened? After the NGT order, Rs 2-lakh cheques were distributed and a charge sheet filed against the chief engineer; that’s all.
And the paper leaks break a promise made to the youth — to do things transparently. The recent events at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi are a reminder that accountability must be fixed.
Manufacturing acceptance of structural failure
How does this non-accountability become a normal, with very few questioning it? The ruling class does not maintain control solely through the coercive state apparatuses; it also relies on cultural hegemony. It is the use of superstructural institutions to shape perception so that systemic exploitation and failure appear natural, inevitable and unavoidable.
The political-contractor nexus that profits off cheap infrastructure, substandard materials and corrupted tender processes from public reckoning is a pattern. When a contaminated water line kills a child in Indore, distinct superstructural mechanisms are deployed: it is an ideological question — the media and political rhetoric reframe a crime of gross administrative negligence into a tragedy of ‘bad luck’ or an ‘act of God.’ The violence of broken infrastructure is converted into the vocabulary of destiny; the state offers a financial payout (ex gratia compensation). This transforms the constitutional duty of safety into a commercial transaction: the state pays a small fee for a life lost, shielding responsible officials from individual criminal liability. The other way is performative regulation: rushed legislation, high-profile suspensions without subsequent prosecution and judicial committees give the illusion of forceful state action while preserving the underlying systemic dynamics intact. This something that we have been witnessing for a long time.
The architecture of evasion
Urban governance is designed to diffuse responsibility. The 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992 promised urban local bodies (ULBs) self-government by transferring funds, functions and functionaries (the ‘three Fs’). Three decades on, that constitutional mandate remains largely unfulfilled. Even the CAG has pointed it out.
Instead, a single municipal road or water network is carved up between competing state agencies: water boards, public works departments (PWD), the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), municipal corporations, and state urban development authorities. When someone dies, each agency points a finger at the other. In 2025, the Bombay High Court called out this pattern, describing it as a ‘no-man’s zone’ tactic, and ordered the civic bodies and state departments to pay joint compensation rather than litigate over jurisdiction while grieving families wait.
Legal structures are maintained to preserve elite dominance. This manifests as a structural disconnect between executive power and democratic answerability: the municipal commissioner is an appointed bureaucrat answerable upward to state political leaders, holding absolute executive and financial control, but faces no ballot box. Whereas the mayor is directly answerable downward to local citizens, but lacks the engineering budget, administrative authority or control required to fix urban infrastructure.
The introduction of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) under programmes like the Smart Cities Mission accelerated this trend. SPVs placed massive public development budgets into corporate, non-elected structures shielded from municipal councils and public oversight.
Reclaiming the spaces
A democratic republic cannot endure when public institutions operate without consequence. When young citizens observe that money replaces justice, jurisdictional disputes replace prevention and lawmaking serves as political theatre, the foundational social contract fractures.
To dismantle this entrenched culture of non-accountability, policy and institutional reforms must address both structural governance models and legal enforcement mechanisms. Constitutional devolution is needed. For example, in the context of the 74th constitutional Amendment that transferred the three Fs to municipal bodies, let there be single agency ownership — eliminate jurisdictional overlaps by designing a single agency with sole operational and legal ownership. Secondly, enforcement transparency is needed that mandates public annual reporting of charge-sheets, trial outcomes and checking of administrative negligence. Thirdly, a criminal liability framework with mandatory criminal investigations targeting contractors and bureaucrats who approve of substandard work is needed.
Until these structural shifts occur, the pothole, the poisoned tap and the leaked exam paper will recur. They will persist not as unexpected failures of an otherwise sound system, but as evidence of a system functioning exactly as it was designed: to shield power from consequence, ensuring that no one is ever held accountable.
About the author
Tikender Singh Panwar, former Deputy Mayor of Shimla Municipal Corporation, is a public policy commentator and writer focusing on urban governance, democratic decentralisation, environment, and public accountability.
This article was first published in The Tribune as Žero accountability, the new normal on 18th August 2026.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgements :
This article was posted by Divya Natarajan, a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI.
