I have lived in Gurgaon for almost 14 years, and I cannot remember a single monsoon when we did not have the same conversation.
It rains heavily, roads get flooded, traffic comes to a standstill, pictures and videos go viral, politicians visit affected areas, officials make statements, meetings are called, and promises are made. Then the rain stops, everyone moves on, and next year we repeat the same thing.
Every time it rains heavily in Gurgaon, I start getting messages from employees saying they cannot reach the office because their area or the roads are flooded and asking if they can work from home.
Multiply that across thousands of companies and lakhs of employees.
People lose two, three, sometimes four hours in traffic. Meetings get cancelled, people cannot reach offices, deliveries get delayed, and businesses lose productive hours. Businesses are disrupted, and employees reach work exhausted, if they reach at all.
There is a real economic cost to this that nobody seems to calculate.
Then there is the higher cost. Gurgaon sells itself as one of India’s leading corporate and technology hubs. Global companies operate here, startups are built here, and some of India’s most expensive real estate is here. Yet every monsoon, a few hours of rain can expose how fragile the city’s basic infrastructure still is.
We talk endlessly about attracting investment and building India into a global technology and startup hub, but infrastructure itself is part of the investment environment.
Think about that contradiction. We have managed to create world-class office buildings, luxury residential complexes, malls, restaurants and private infrastructure, but we still struggle with basic drainage, roads, traffic management, sewage, footpaths and public infrastructure.
That is not a lack of money or talent; it’s an execution problem. Gurugram contributed around Rs 48,000 crore to the central exchequer as income tax, which is 65 per cent of Haryana’s share, making it the ninth-largest contributor of income tax among Indian cities. Gurugram attracts a large share of Haryana’s total investments, contributing almost 70 per cent, while almost 60 per cent of Haryana’s revenue accrues from Gurugram through excise duty, sales tax, stamp duty and registration. Gurugram has the third-highest per capita income in India.
However, Gurugram has no proper roads, no drainage system.
Part of the problem is also how Gurgaon has developed. Different private developers can build excellent infrastructure inside their own developments, but a city cannot function as a collection of islands. Rainwater does not care where one developer’s boundary ends, and another begins.
Where will the water eventually flow, how are drains connected across the city, where are the bottlenecks, which roads need redesigning, how does development in one area affect another — these are city-level problems, and they require city-level planning.
More importantly, they require clear accountability. Today, when something goes wrong in Gurgaon, responsibility appears fragmented across multiple authorities and departments; everyone seems responsible for a small part, which often means nobody is truly accountable for the outcome.
If Gurgaon were a company and its core infrastructure failed every single year in the same way, the management would have been replaced long ago. Why should the standard for running one of India’s most important economic cities be any lower?
The Haryana government needs to treat Gurgaon like a mission-critical economic project, give someone clear ownership of the city’s infrastructure, give them authority across departments, define measurable outcomes and then hold that person accountable.
We don’t need another inspection after Gurgaon floods. We don’t need another statement about pumps being deployed or drains being cleaned; these are inputs. Citizens should care about outcomes.
Did the city flood or not, did traffic collapse or not, how many hours did people lose, did the same locations flood again — these should be the report card.
There is another cost, which is harder to calculate: Reputation. Imagine being a global CEO or investor visiting Gurgaon and spending hours stuck on a flooded road. They may sit inside a world-class office the next morning, but the flooded road is also part of their experience of doing business in India.
Gurgaon should easily be one of India’s showcase cities; it has the companies, talent, capital, entrepreneurship and ambition. What it desperately needs now is competent urban management. We don’t need to build another Gurgaon; we need to make the Gurgaon we already built actually work.
The writer is CEO, Knot Dating
A flooded underpass (left), and Gate 3 of Ardee City in Sector 52 with near knee-length levels of waterlogging (right). (Express Photos) 
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