Who Is Responsible For The Road Outside Your House, And Why The Answer Is Nobody आपके घर के बाहर वाली सड़क के लिए ज़िम्मेदार कौन है, और इसका जवाब कोई क्यों नहीं है Who Is Responsible For The Road Outside Your House, And Why The Answer Is Nobody ਤੁਹਾਡੇ ਘਰ ਤੋਂ ਬਾਹਰ ਵਾਲੀ ਸੜਕ ਲਈ ਜ਼ਿੰਮੇਵਾਰ ਕੌਣ ਹੈ, ਅਤੇ ਜਵਾਬ ਕੋਈ ਨਹੀਂ ਕਿਉਂ ਹੈ

Start with a single stretch of waterlogged road on the Kharar-Landran route, and ask who has to fix it.

The road belongs to the National Highways Authority of India. The pumps draining it were deployed by the Kharar Municipal Council. The water is sewer outflow and stormwater from Shivalik City and adjoining private colonies, discharging into an NHAI drain that has overflowed. The permanent fix is a pipeline connecting that discharge to a Sewage Treatment Plant still under construction, which belongs to the Punjab Water Supply and Sewerage Board and has been tendered but not laid.

Four bodies and a private colony, and not one of them is answerable for the outcome. Getting them into the same conversation required the Deputy Commissioner to physically visit the site and issue instructions, which is what it takes when responsibility is distributed and accountability is not.

That is not an unusual arrangement in this district. It is the normal one, and understanding it is more useful to a buyer than any amount of drive-time arithmetic.

The handover was supposed to answer the question

GMADA builds a sector, then hands it to the Municipal Corporation to run. In principle that settles it: the authority develops, the corporation maintains, and at any given moment one of them is responsible.

In practice it has been a decade-long negotiation over money. In 2016 the corporation's general house adopted GMADA's written proposals to transfer maintenance and capital works in Sectors 48 to 71 and Sectors 76 to 81, covering roads, water supply, sewerage, sanitation, streetlighting, horticulture, community centres, sports complexes, solid waste and transport. It was the first time GMADA had extended financial assistance of that kind, and it came to ₹362.5 crore, released against utilisation certificates every three months.

The schedule matters more than the total. GMADA was to pay ₹50 crore a year from 2016-17 to 2020-21, then ₹22.50 crore a year from 2021-22 to 2025-26.

That last instalment falls in the current financial year. The money attached to the first great handover runs out now.

And the next handover has stalled on price

The Local Government Department has issued a draft notification to extend the corporation's limits, inviting objections over three weeks. The plan covers Aerocity, IT City, Sectors 81 to 95, the industrial Sectors 73 and 74, and Sector 57. If it goes through, the corporation's budget and area roughly double and its population rises by around half, putting Mohali behind only Ludhiana, Amritsar and Jalandhar in the state. The move was prodded by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

Worth noting what is not in it. TDI City, Balongi, Badhmajra, Mauli Baidwan, Lakhnaur and several other villages find no mention in the Schedule of Boundary as it stands, though some reporting has described the expansion as taking in fourteen adjoining villages. Which villages come in, and when, is not settled.

The corporation's response to the areas that are in it was to resolve to seek at least ₹1,000 crore from GMADA before formally taking over, citing incomplete road networks, inadequate drainage and insufficient civic amenities.

That is the answer to the question in the title, stated by the responsible body itself. The corporation is declining to be responsible until it is paid for the state the sectors arrive in. It is making that demand in the same year the previous funding package expires. And GMADA, for its part, is owed over ₹1,000 crore by nearly thirty promoters in external development charges, licence fees and social infrastructure dues, as our report on the dues register set out.

The money that should have built the infrastructure is disputed at one end of the chain. The cost of its absence is disputed at the other. For anyone living in between, the interval has no owner.

What an unowned interval looks like

It looks like a decade of monsoons.

A hundred-metre stretch of the dividing road between Sectors 61 and 70 sank after the sewer line beneath it collapsed. The sewer from PCL to Kumbhra Chowk gave way, as did the stormwater drainage near CP-67 Chowk, which had recently been repaired. In Phase 11, the road through the market spent a monsoon dug open for a stormwater drain, a 1,400 mm pipeline of roughly 750 metres from the petrol pump to the golf range, until a state minister visited and ordered the remainder finished in 45 days. On the Nijjar Road and Chajju Majra stretch, residents describe school buses going into open drains and traders shutting up until the road becomes passable.

In July 2023, after a flood-like week, early morning showers again inundated low-lying areas. Rainwater entered houses in Sector 71 and TDI City. Residents opened the roadside gullies themselves, which is what happens when the question of who should have opened them has no answer. Ballomajra, Santemajra and Shivalik City all reported flooding, the Kharar-Landran road crawled, and a slip road near Kumbhra Chowk in Phase 9 caved in.

Note the pattern in the two cases that got fixed. A minister visited Phase 11. A Deputy Commissioner visited Kharar-Landran. In a system with clear responsibility, neither visit would be necessary.

TDI City, and the certificate that closes the question permanently

The clearest documented case sits in Sector 117, and it shows how the answer becomes nobody on paper rather than merely in practice.

During that July 2023 monsoon, with TDI City residents also reporting power cuts of up to ten hours, Sumiksha Sood, president of the TDI Residents Rights Protection and Welfare Society, said MLA Kulwant Singh had informed them that a technical audit of all sectors of TDI Infratech Ltd would be carried out, with action to follow against both the builder and the GMADA officials concerned for any deficiencies found in infrastructure and maintenance, because a partial completion certificate had been issued despite poor infrastructure in the township. Her stated position was that the audit had not been started.

That contains the whole mechanism. A completion certificate, even a partial one, is the document that says the developed infrastructure meets the standard. Once it is issued, nobody is responsible, because the paperwork records that the obligation was discharged. Residents living with the result have to reopen a question the file has already closed, and they have to do it against a builder and an authority simultaneously, each of which can point at the certificate and at the other.

Whether that audit was ever conducted in the three years since is not something the public record makes clear.

Our project pages for TDI City Phase 1, TDI City Phase 2 and TDI Connaught Residency in Sector 71 carry the current listing position in each.

What it takes to make somebody responsible

Sectors 100 and 104 answer that, and the answer is discouraging.

Pearl City was launched in 2006 across those two sectors. In 2014, Nirmal Singh Bhangoo, chairman and managing director of Pearls Agrotech Corporation Limited, was booked by the CBI in a ₹45,000 crore Ponzi investigation and the company's properties, including this project, were attached. With the developer gone, there was no answer at all to who maintained anything. It took the Supreme Court to appoint one, tasking GMADA with developing the society.

As of May 2020, around 1,300 allottees were still waiting. Roughly 160 families were living across 450 acres with around ₹600 crore invested, in sectors that had no sewerage system, no proper roads and no streetlights. GMADA had by then prepared estimates of around ₹105 crore for internal development works on the Supreme Court's directions. What has been built there in the six years since is not established by any reporting we could find.

So it took a criminal case, an attachment and an order of the Supreme Court to name a responsible party, and six years after that the position is undocumented. That is what the outer limit looks like, and it is occupied.

How to find out who, when the default is nobody

Four questions, none of which appear in a listing, and all of which have answers.

Which body currently maintains the area, and whether it is GMADA, the Municipal Corporation, a municipal council, or a private developer under an ongoing maintenance obligation. In the areas covered by the draft expansion the honest answer is that it is unresolved, and knowing that is better than assuming.

Whether the area has a completion certificate, and whether it is full or partial. That single document determines whether infrastructure deficiencies are a live claim or a closed matter.

Who owns the road the property fronts. A national highway, a state road and a sector road have different owners, different budgets and different response times, and a stretch that is somebody's boundary tends to be nobody's priority.

And where the colony's sewage and stormwater actually discharge. The Kharar-Landran situation exists because private colonies drain into a highway drain that was not built for them. That arrangement is not visible from a plot and it is not temporary.

Current asking prices and inventory across these areas sit on our Mohali corridor page and our Tricity page.

The gap between a sector that works and one that floods is rarely about how much was spent. It is about whether anybody was clearly responsible for spending it. In a district where an authority builds, a corporation maintains, a council covers the town beyond, a highway authority owns the arterial and a private developer holds the internal roads until it hands them over, the road outside your house has five possible owners and no certain one. That is not a gap in the system. It is the system.

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Sources

- Immediately repair Kharar-Landran road to ensure smooth traffic flow: DC to NHAI officials, The Tribune, on the NHAI drain, the Kharar Municipal Council pumps, the Shivalik City discharge and the Sewerage Board pipeline
- Road cave-ins haunt Mohali, The Tribune, on the Sector 61-70 collapse, the PCL to Kumbhra Chowk sewer, the CP-67 Chowk drainage and the Nijjar Road and Chajju Majra conditions
- Tribune Impact: Minister directs department to complete Phase 11 stormwater drain work in 45 days, The Tribune, on the Phase 11 pipeline specification and the 45 day direction
- Rain back, so is waterlogging, Mohali residents at wits' end, The Tribune, 23 July 2023, on the flooding across Sector 71, TDI City, Ballomajra, Santemajra and Shivalik City, and on the TDI residents' society statement about the technical audit and the partial completion certificate
- Maintenance works transferred to Mohali MC, Kulwinder Sangha, The Tribune, 2016, on the transfer of Sectors 48 to 71 and 76 to 81, the ₹362.5 crore package and the payment schedule to 2025-26
- Mohali MC limits set for expansion, The Tribune, on the draft notification, the areas covered, the villages absent from the Schedule of Boundary and the High Court's role
- Mohali MC demands Rs 1,000 crore from GMADA before taking over newly added areas, Swarajya, January 2026, on the corporation's resolution and the stated infrastructure deficiencies
- GMADA prepares ₹105 crore estimates for development works, Hindustan Times, 9 May 2020, on Sectors 100 and 104, the PACL attachment, the allottees and the absence of sewerage, roads and streetlights