India's top cities can be a nightmare to live in

This hobbles the Asian giant's ability to retain its best and brightest and attract world-class talent.

- Debarshi Dasgupta

Ask any Indian to name the country’s cleanest city, and chances are that Indore’s name will come up first. The city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has been named as the cleanest for eight consecutive years in a flagship government countrywide cleanliness survey.

It is a laurel the city’s officials and residents are fiercely proud of and defend as tenaciously as a football club would its championship trophy. Roads are refreshingly cleaner here and Indore’s residents dump their waste dutifully each morning into municipal trucks after pre-segregating it into as many as six categories, including electronic and plastic.

Which is why what happened in December 2025 was so jarring. Indore’s stellar reputation was besmirched when at least 15 people died after consuming contaminated water, caused by a leakage in a pipeline that had allowed sewage to mix with potable supply.

This tragic incident exposes the poor governance underpinning even India’s best-run cities - one that causes infrastructure to often collapse. It is a tragedy that repeats itself amid diffused urban governance power and blurred accountability.

The country’s biggest cities today are an apology for urban governance — their roads are often gridlocked with traffic, drainage systems are so weak that entire neighbourhoods flood every monsoon, and the air is so toxic that even something as fundamental as breathing can seem a chore at times.

GLOBAL AMBITIONS, LOCAL CHALLENGES

Indian cities rank poorly on several global liveability metrics despite hundreds of billions spent upgrading infrastructure — a distinction hardly befitting the world’s fastest-growing large economy.

New Delhi and Mumbai were placed 120 and 121 in the 2025 Global Liveability Index released by the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranked more than 170 cities, reflecting persistent weaknesses in infrastructure, air quality and public safety.