Every uncovered manhole is not just a civic failure but a quiet reminder of how cheaply human life is treated on India’s streets.
In the crowded streets of Indian cities, from Delhi to Noida, Kolkata to Nagpur a silent crisis unfolds with grim regularity: people dying because a hole in the ground was left uncovered. These open manholes and pits, often dug for sewer work, cable laying, or maintenance, are not abstract hazards. They are death traps that swallow human beings children, workers, daily commuters with haunting frequency. And yet, the response to this danger often reeks of apathy, delay, and institutional complacency.
This is not a tragedy of fate. This is a tragedy of governance.
A Death Every 12 Hours
According to data compiled from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), at least one person in India dies every 12 hours after falling into an open pit or manhole, totalling 5,393 deaths between 2015 and 2020. Only about 3% of people involved in such accidents survive with injuries the rest perish in preventable horror.
Imagine that for a moment: two human lives lost every day not because of disease, drought, or disaster, but because of a hole in the ground that someone failed to cover.
And when bodies fall silent into that void, the bureaucratic answer is often to record the death as an “accidental fall.” This classification skirts responsibility and eliminates urgency, no reckoning, no systemic reform, no accountability.
Advocates suggest these deaths should be classified as negligence, if not culpable homicide, because the upkeep of roads and sewers is a statutory duty of civic authorities. When they fail, people pay with their lives.
The Viral Video: A Mirror to Negligence
Just recently, a video went viral from Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar showing a man filming an open manhole and waiting and waiting after complaining to municipal authorities, expecting someone to fix it. Minutes passed, the sun set, and he eventually walked away. Nobody came.
It resonated so deeply because it reflects a broader truth many Indians feel every day: your life isn’t urgent. Your complaint is a burden to be filed, logged, and perhaps ignored. Only when people suffer or worse, die-does the machine grudgingly move.
Social media erupts in sarcasm and frustration: “If someone falls in, then only someone will come,” one commenter joked. Another wrote, “We pay taxes for this, but still we fix it ourselves.” There is humor in the despair because pain told without irony feels unbearable.
Recent Deaths That Should Not Have Happened
The physical consequences of negligence are all too real:
- In Rohini, Delhi, a 32-year-old daily wage labourer died after slipping into an uncovered manhole on a lonely street. The rescue team found his body only the next day.
- In Kolkata’s Rajpur-Sonarpur, Jayanta Ghosh, a contracted worker, lost his life while removing plastic blockage from a waterlogged manhole after heavy rain though unsafe to enter, he was doing what should have been part of a managed effort.
- In Noida’s Sector 46, long-unrepaired and broken manholes, some jutting above the road surface pose daily threats to children and elderly pedestrians who navigate those roads without fear warning.
These are not isolated tragedies. The pattern is persistent, painful, and predictable.
When Monsoons Turn Manholes Into Death Traps
The danger intensifies during India’s monsoon season. Streets flood. Waterlogging hides open manholes beneath an illusion of smooth surface. Where a two-wheeler might glide, a hidden void awaits.
In Mumbai, heavy rains have repeatedly submerged roads and made manholes invisible hazards. Viral footage from prior monsoons shows terrified commuters swept into deep drains and in one case, rescue teams pulling a woman’s body out after she was carried 70 metres by rainwater flowing through an uncovered drainage hole.
In another story that highlights the peril of rain-filled streets, a man in Gurgaon drowned in an open sewer after his autorickshaw toppled in the floodwaters at night and 200 calls by his pregnant wife to find help went unanswered until dawn.
Rain doesn’t just expose existing cracks in governance it magnifies them. Water hides danger and invites tragedy. And still, the systemic response remains lethargic.
Public Outrage, Slow Action
When outrage finally bubbles over as it has this week in Delhi and other cities authorities sometimes respond. But consider how far the needle has to move: only when something becomes visible on the internet does it get fixed quickly. Complaints in formal grievance apps often go unanswered. Calls to municipal helplines can disappear into bureaucratic black holes.
And worse, even where authorities do act, it’s more about optics than sustained safety. Quick fixes may cover one pit, while dozens more remain neglected.
The Human Cost of Apathy
These deaths are more than statistics. They are families shattered at unexpected doorsteps. Children orphaned. Breadwinners gone without explanation. And behind many numbers are stories of frustration like a housewife waiting for her husband who never returned because a rain-swollen pit swallowed him; or a child who nearly died, saved only by her mother’s split-second courage, in footage that also trended because so many could relate to the dread.
When citizens act with urgency but authorities do not, it sends an unspoken message: some lives are less urgent. It is a perception that corrodes trust in governance and feeds a cycle of resentment and one that no government or bureaucracy should ever tolerate.
A Broken System Demands Accountability
The core problem is not merely the existence of open manholes but the governance systems that allow them to persist. Accountability is fragmented. Multiple agencies police, municipal corporations, water boards, and public works departments may share responsibility for roads and sewers. Without clear ownership, hazards fall between cracks, and no one is motivated to fix them promptly.
Lawyers and urban planners argue that classifying these deaths as “accidental” obscures the preventable nature of the problem and shields officials from consequences. If the legal system treated these as outcomes of negligence, there might be stronger incentives to enforce safety protocols, inspect work sites, and ensure manholes are promptly covered.
Conclusion: A Call to Value Life
The truth is simple but urgent: no human life should ever be a statistic buried under a manhole cover. The daily toll from accidents to drownings is not just a failure of infrastructure, it is an indictment of governance that lists human loss as merely incidental.
If governments treat citizen complaints with the same urgency they treat election season, open manholes won’t be hazards they’ll be fixed hazards. If the law acknowledges responsibility instead of cataloguing death as fate, accountability will follow.
Until then, every uncovered manhole, every delayed response, and every ignored complaint is not merely a hole in the ground, it is a hole in our collective conscience.
