By Apurva Pathak
Across India, the monsoon is once again testing cities, roads, drainage networks and public institutions.
On 13 August 2026, heavy-rainfall warnings extended across multiple parts of the country, with forecasts of heavy to very heavy rainfall and associated risks of waterlogging and disruption in several regions.
Every intense spell produces a familiar sequence: the rain arrives, roads fill with water, underpasses close, traffic stalls, pumps are activated, drains are cleared, municipal teams are deployed, and questions are asked about desilting, encroachments, inadequate capacity and maintenance.
Then the water recedes. Repairs begin. And gradually, institutional attention moves elsewhere. We commonly discuss urban flooding as an engineering problem: Are the drains large enough? Were they desilted? Is the rainfall more intense than before? All are legitimate questions.
But there is another question that receives far less attention:
Who is actually accountable for the performance of each individual component of the stormwater system?
That question leads directly to a larger proposition. India may need to reconsider not merely how stormwater infrastructure is built, but how its performance is governed.
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THE PROBLEM — EVERYONE OWNS THE NETWORK, BUT WHO OWNS THE FAILURE?
A stormwater system is not one asset. It is a network containing thousands of individual components: manholes, catchpits, inspection chambers, pipes, culverts, channels, pumps, detention structures, outfalls, gates and associated electrical and control systems.
Yet municipal management frequently operates at a much broader level. A contractor may be appointed to desilt drains in a ward. Another agency may maintain pumping stations. A road department may control culverts. Another utility may excavate around underground drainage. Capital works may be undertaken under a separate project contract.
When flooding occurs, responsibility can therefore become distributed across multiple institutions and contracts. The network belongs to the city. But accountability for the performance of an individual asset can become surprisingly difficult to establish.
Was a particular manhole inspected? Was the connecting pipe obstructed? Had a defect already been reported? Was the pump operational? Was maintenance overdue? Did a previous flood expose the same weakness? Who was responsible for correcting it?
These questions should be simple. Too often, answering them requires reconstructing information from drawings, GIS records, maintenance registers, contractor reports and institutional memory.
This is the governance problem that STHAVAR — System for Trusted, Harmonised Asset Verification, Administration and Registry — seeks to address.
If an infrastructure asset can independently fail, be inspected, maintained, replaced or held accountable, it should normally be independently identifiable.
A manhole should therefore have a persistent identity. So should a pump. So should a culvert. A pipeline should be divided into operationally meaningful segments, with each maintainable segment capable of being identified throughout its lifecycle.
The proposed STHAVAR Ank becomes the permanent reference through which every inspection, defect, repair, replacement and performance event can be linked to the same physical asset.
The objective is not identification for its own sake. It is traceability to responsibility.
THE COST — REACTIVE MAINTENANCE REWARDS ACTIVITY, NOT PERFORMANCE
Much municipal maintenance is still organised around activities: clean this drain, desilt this length of channel, inspect these chambers, deploy these pumps, complete the work before monsoon.
The contractor can potentially demonstrate that the specified activity occurred. That does not necessarily mean the infrastructure subsequently performed.
This distinction matters. A city does not ultimately need a drain to be cleaned. It needs the drain to drain. A pumping station is not valuable because maintenance visits were completed. It is valuable because it remains operational when required. A culvert has not succeeded because an inspection form was signed. It succeeds when the required flow can pass through it safely.
When contracts purchase activities rather than outcomes, the incentive structure can become disconnected from the purpose of the infrastructure. The city pays for maintenance. The contractor performs the specified task. But the consequences of failure remain largely with the public authority and citizens.
That is why the next evolution of stormwater governance should be from maintenance contracting to performance contracting.
India already has experience with private participation in infrastructure. The Government of India’s PPP database separately classifies storm-water drainage systems and currently lists 69 projects with an aggregate reported cost of approximately ₹9,241 crore. Individual records include stormwater schemes and pumping infrastructure in cities including Coimbatore, Madurai and Mumbai.
The question, therefore, is not whether private participation is conceivable. The more important question is:
Can private participation be redesigned around measurable lifecycle performance?
THE SOLUTION — PRIVATISE PERFORMANCE RESPONSIBILITY, NOT NECESSARILY PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
The strongest model is not simply to sell urban drainage infrastructure. Stormwater networks perform an essential public function. Municipalities should retain strategic ownership, planning authority, statutory control and the responsibility to determine acceptable service standards.
What can be transferred is defined long-term performance responsibility.
Consider the difference. A conventional contract might state: “Maintain the stormwater network within Zone A.”
A STHAVAR-enabled concession could instead identify precisely 6,420 manholes, 1,760 pipeline segments, 315 culverts, 28 pumping stations, 57 outfalls, and specified channels and detention assets. Each asset begins the concession with a known identity and baseline condition.
The private operator assumes responsibility for that defined portfolio. Contractual obligations could then cover inspection frequency, asset condition, blockage response, preventive maintenance, pump availability, defect closure, emergency mobilisation, record keeping and performance during defined operating conditions.
Suddenly the contract becomes much harder to blur: These are the assets. This was their condition when responsibility transferred. These were the required standards. This is what happened during the storm. This is who was responsible.
That is what permanent digital identity makes possible.
From Desilting Contracts to Performance Contracts
A critical shift would be to stop paying primarily for activity. Instead of asking how many kilometres were cleaned, ask how many identified assets remained serviceable. Instead of asking how many inspections were undertaken, ask whether identified defects were closed before they became failures. Instead of asking how many pumps were serviced, ask what pumping availability was achieved during the qualifying rainfall event.
The payment mechanism could combine availability, condition, response, performance and resilience. The operator is no longer merely paid to undertake maintenance. It is paid to maintain performance.
Rainfall Must Remain Outside the Operator’s Control
This model requires an important safeguard. A private operator cannot be held responsible simply because flooding occurred. Stormwater infrastructure is designed for defined capacities. Extreme rainfall can exceed those capacities.
Performance assessment must therefore distinguish between the hazard and the asset response. This is where the wider Saptarishi architecture becomes useful.
The Jamadagni Layer provides authoritative environmental intelligence: rainfall, hydrology, terrain, catchment conditions and related data. A qualifying natural-hazard event can be given a permanent event identity through the proposed Viśvāmitra Event Ank. STHAVAR then identifies exactly which physical assets were exposed and records how each performed.
India already has national systems for geo-targeted disaster warnings. NDMA’s SACHET platform integrates alerts from agencies including IMD and CWC and distributes geographically targeted warnings. STHAVAR does not replace these systems. It provides the missing link between the event and the individual infrastructure that experienced it.
The Real Prize — Anticipatory Maintenance
Long-term private performance responsibility changes incentives. A contractor paid to repair a blocked drain earns when the blockage is cleared. A concessionaire responsible for performance over 15 years benefits when the blockage never occurs.
Suppose the same pipeline segment requires cleaning repeatedly. A short-term maintenance regime may simply keep cleaning it. A long-term performance operator has reason to ask why. Is the gradient inadequate? Is the pipe deforming? Is sediment entering upstream? Is groundwater infiltration occurring? Is downstream capacity inadequate? Is the asset simply reaching the end of its useful life?
Once future failure carries a cost to the operator, root-cause prevention becomes economically valuable.
As each STHAVAR asset accumulates condition and performance history, maintenance can progressively evolve from reactive maintenance, to preventive maintenance, to condition-based maintenance, to predictive maintenance, and finally to anticipatory maintenance.
A pipe segment can accumulate age, material, gradient, inspections, blockages, rainfall exposure, repairs, failures and performance. Across thousands of assets, patterns become visible. The city and operator can identify the small proportion of assets creating a disproportionate share of recurring failures. Capital expenditure becomes better targeted. Maintenance becomes evidence-led.
A Stronger Municipality, Not a Weaker One
There is an important caveat. Private participation without intelligent public governance can merely replace one accountability problem with another.
The municipality must remain capable of defining service standards, auditing performance, validating information, enforcing deductions and deciding long-term investment priorities.
STHAVAR can strengthen that role. Because asset identity and lifecycle memory persist independently of the operator, a municipality no longer loses institutional knowledge whenever a concession or contractor changes.
The city remains the asset owner. The private party becomes the performance operator. The record survives both. That is a much stronger relationship than conventional outsourcing.
FROM FLOOD RESPONSE TO INFRASTRUCTURE GOVERNANCE
India will continue to experience intense rainfall. Some events will exceed infrastructure design capacity. Urbanisation will continue adding pressure to catchments, roads, utilities and drainage networks.
The answer cannot therefore be a promise that cities will never flood. The more realistic objective is that avoidable infrastructure failure becomes identifiable, measurable and increasingly preventable.
STHAVAR provides one possible foundation. Identify every independently governable stormwater asset. Establish its condition. Allocate clear responsibility. Record every inspection and intervention. Measure how it performs during significant rainfall. Reward long-term performance rather than short-term activity. And use accumulated evidence to intervene before the next failure.
The debate over stormwater infrastructure should therefore move beyond the simplistic question of public versus private. The better question is:
Who is accountable for the performance of this particular asset when the rain arrives?
If a city cannot answer that question for every critical manhole, pipe segment, culvert and pump, then the governance system remains incomplete.
The municipality should remain the intelligent owner. The private operator can become accountable for performance. STHAVAR can provide the permanent evidence connecting the two.
And ultimately, the measure of success should not be how quickly India repairs its drainage infrastructure after the next flood.
It should be how much avoidable failure is prevented before the rain arrives.
About The Author – (Apurva Pathak is a New Zealand-based architect, design manager, and built-environment governance
practitioner with more than three decades of experience across India, the Gulf, Africa, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand. He is the author of the Saptarishi Framework, a proposed seven-layer Digital Public Infrastructure architecture for India’s built environment, integrating BIM, GIS, land governance, municipal automation, digital twins, environmental intelligence, and resilience planning.)
Disclaimer—(The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Indian Masterminds. For feedback or queries, please write to [email protected].)
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