System Failure

The accident and the gargantuan traffic snarl along the Mumbai–Pune Expressway after a gas tanker overturned was a brutal exposure of Maharashtra’s hollowness in emergency preparedness, crisis coordination and basic administrative empathy.

After a tanker carrying highly flammable propylene gas overturned in the Khandala ghat section and a gas leak was detected, traffic was completely shut for over 24 hours as the State administration merely watched commuters in hundreds of cars, buses and trucks standing immobilised. Women, children and the elderly spent a harrowing night to remember, trapped without food, water or toilets. Ambulances and public transport were no exception. Social media, rather than the government, became the primary source of information and outrage.

The Mumbai–Pune Expressway is not an obscure rural road. It is India’s first access-controlled, six-lane concrete expressway, a tolled artery linking the country’s financial capital with one of its most important industrial cities. It passes through terrain that is notoriously accident-prone, especially for heavy vehicles descending slopes. Hazardous cargo on this stretch is routine. That makes the absence of a swift, rehearsed emergency response a damning indictment of the government’s lack of seriousness.

The response exposed a vacuum where leadership should have been. Traffic was diverted too late and too clumsily, funnelled into bottlenecks rather than dispersed upstream. Information systems failed and message boards were useless, and commuters relied on social media for scraps of truth. Relief teams were invisible.

Officials insisted they were working on a ‘war footing.’ If so, it was a war without commanders, maps or supply lines. Closing an expressway in the face of a gas leak is the easiest decision to take. Managing what happens to thousands of stranded people afterwards is the hard part and the Maharashtra government showed it has not even begun to think seriously about that obligation.

The cruelty lay not only in the delay but in the indifference. There was no single authoritative voice explaining what had happened, how long it might last, or what help was on the way. In a state that boasts of digital governance and real-time dashboards, silence reigned where communication should have been relentless.

Systems exist precisely to prevent one driver’s error from cascading into mass suffering. When hundreds are stranded overnight without water or toilets on a premium toll road, responsibility lies squarely with the state.

Maharashtra has repeatedly shown that it excels at inaugurating infrastructure and falters at operating it under stress. The implications are serious. An immobilised expressway is a public-safety hazard. In a country scarred by road fatalities, such negligence is indefensible.

Maharashtra likes to see itself as India’s gateway to global capital. In this vein, the Mumbai–Pune Expressway was meant to symbolise modern governance. Instead, it revealed a state that can build infrastructure but cannot manage it under stress, that can collect tolls but cannot deliver care and that treats citizens as revenue streams rather than lives to be protected.