No Potholes In Bengaluru Says Deputy CM DK Shivakumar; Faces Backlash
When a senior leader says a city has “no potholes”, Bengaluru’s commuters do not need a fact-check. They just need their morning ride. That is why Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar’s recent claim that potholes are basically gone, and that the rest is “social media creation”, hit a nerve immediately.
The backlash is predictable because potholes here are not a minor irritation. They are a daily safety issue, especially for two-wheelers. They force sudden swerves, late braking, and risky lane changes that have nothing to do with traffic flow and everything to do with staying upright. In the wet season, the risk doubles because water hides depth.
If you want a single image that captures the gap between statement and street, look at the Panathur stretch in the Mahadevapura belt.
A school bus carrying around 20 children tilted after its wheel sank into a rain-filled ditch on the Balagere-Panathur Road. Everyone got out safely, but residents again pointed to potholes, ditches, and poor drainage.
To be fair, agencies are not pretending nothing is being done. Public updates have linked pothole filling to a wider overhaul programme that includes concrete roads, white-topping, black-topping, and defect-liability stretches where contractors are supposed to be accountable if work fails early.
The problem is that the city’s own road math refuses to cooperate with victory slogans. One detailed snapshot of Bengaluru’s major road network puts it at 470 major roads totalling 1,344.7 km, with nearly half showing pothole damage. In that same snapshot, the traffic police had identified 4,830 potholes on major roads alone. That does not even get into internal roads where many two-wheeler crashes actually happen.
So both things can be true at once. A lot of potholes can be “fixed”, and the city can still feel broken. If a patch fails after the next shower, commuters do not experience it as “fixed earlier”. They experience it as “why did it fail again”.
Potholes are not just about asphalt. They are about how the road is built, how water moves, and how often the surface is cut for utility work. If drainage is poor, water sits. If the base is weak, the top layer breaks. If repairs are done in the rain using the wrong method, the patch can wash out quickly.
This is why experts keep warning that the system rewards repeat repairs. One IISc professor has described a “circular economy” around potholes, where constant failures keep the tender-and-repair cycle alive instead of pushing durable construction as the default. Bengaluru drivers recognise this pattern because they have watched the same stretch get patched, break, patched again, and break again.
Even “durable” solutions are not magic if execution is weak. When expensive white-topped roads develop potholes within months, it points to quality control and accountability problems, not just material choice.
If the goal is to make Bengaluru genuinely safer for drivers, riders, and pedestrians, the checklist is not complicated. It is just hard to execute.
Fix drainage alongside the road surface. Standardise wet-weather repair methods and enforce them with on-ground checks. Make every repaired stretch traceable, so citizens can see who built it, when it was repaired, and who is accountable during the defect-liability period. And stop treating pothole counts like a PR scoreboard. Treat them like a safety metric, especially for two-wheelers.
There is also a business cost. When a senior executive publicly talks about relocating out of Bengaluru and points to commuting conditions, it is not just a civic embarrassment. It is an economic warning. The city does not need a “no potholes” headline. It needs roads that stay intact through one full monsoon cycle.