The Maintenance Imperative

On Technology Day, India’s future as a technological power will depend as much on a culture of maintenance as on innovation itself.

National Technology Day, observed on May 11, commemorates India’s successful Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998, a powerful demonstration of scientific capability, strategic ambition, and sustained national effort. These milestones rightly celebrate innovation and breakthroughs. Yet they also prompt a deeper reflection: such achievements rest not only on moments of genius but on decades of meticulous planning, testing, repair and upkeep. Technology thrives on continuity, discipline, and the unglamorous work of keeping complex systems operational over time.

The Pokhran-II tests, conducted under conditions of extraordinary secrecy, represented the culmination of decades of scientific institution-building that began soon after Independence. Under figures such as Homi Jehangir Bhabha and later Vikram Sarabhai, India invested heavily in indigenous scientific capacity despite scarce resources and international technology restrictions. The country’s atomic and space programmes evolved not through sudden bursts of innovation alone, but through years of patient experimentation, repeated setbacks, rigorous maintenance of facilities and the cultivation of technical expertise across generations. Even India’s early space missions depended on engineers improvising with limited infrastructure while carefully preserving and refining the systems they already possessed.

Costly Pattern

However, across India, a familiar and costly pattern persists. New infrastructure is inaugurated with fanfare, but maintenance often receives far less attention. Costly medical equipment in public hospitals lies idle for want of timely servicing or trained operators. Roads develop potholes within months. Water pipelines leak chronically, and public buildings deteriorate rapidly. These are not failures of design but of upkeep and institutional follow-through.

The economic toll is substantial. According to World Bank estimates, poor maintenance costs low- and middle-income countries at least $390 billion annually in infrastructure disruptions. In India, the maintenance and repair market is projected to grow from around $202 billion in 2024 to over $500 billion by 2033. Poor maintenance accelerates asset degradation, inflates long-term costs, and undermines returns on public investments.

History offers repeated warnings about the consequences of neglect. The decline of once-formidable public infrastructure in many postcolonial states was not always due to lack of ambition or engineering skill, but to inadequate maintenance cultures and weak institutional continuity. Even great empires understood this principle. The Romans maintained roads and aqueducts through disciplined administrative systems; the British Empire sustained its vast railway networks through relentless inspection and repair schedules. In post-Independence India, however, public discourse often celebrated the symbolism of construction more than the less glamorous responsibility of preservation. While ribbon-cutting ceremonies often attract political attention, maintenance budgets rarely do.

Lack of Maintenance

The neglect extends to education and research institutions. New laboratories and campuses are built, yet equipment becomes outdated or non-functional, buildings fall into disrepair, and even guest houses often fail to meet basic standards.

This mindset begins in our education system. Engineering, management, and vocational curricula focus heavily on creation and innovation while treating maintenance, reliability engineering, and lifecycle management as secondary concerns. We must elevate maintenance as a respected, technically rigorous field of study and practice.

Maintenance work itself remains largely invisible. Technicians, operators, and field engineers who keep systems running rarely receive the recognition given to designers. Yet a robust technological ecosystem depends equally on both.

Focusing on maintenance does not diminish innovation. It sustains and amplifies it. Well-maintained systems last longer, operate more efficiently, and free up resources for new endeavours. Industries using preventive and predictive maintenance have reported up to 30% reductions in overheads and sharp drops in unplanned downtime.

Policy and cultural shifts are essential: dedicated long-term funding for asset maintenance, stronger accountability through performance audits and uptime incentives, greater investment in training maintenance professionals, integration of reliability engineering into mainstream curricula, and wider adoption of tools like IoT-based predictive monitoring.

As India aspires to become a developed nation and global technology leader, success will be measured not only by what we build but by how reliably we keep it running. A truly technological society honours the full lifecycle of its creations.

On this Technology Day, let us recognise the quiet professionals who maintain our systems daily and commit to building a national culture of maintenance. Nations do not fail for lack of bold ideas; they falter when they stop sustaining what they have built.

(The writer is an ANRF Prime Minister Professor at COEP Technological University, Pune, and former Director of the Agharkar Research Institute, Pune. Views personal.)