When I got down in Kakinada in the early morning hours, I was expecting a rather difficult climate. Someone accustomed to the weather of a well-planned city like Mysuru rarely adjusts easily to most other Indian towns. Yet the heat and the air were gentler than I had anticipated. Perhaps a few years of living near Kerala’s coast had prepared me better than I realised. What I was not prepared for came later, as I walked towards the apartment where I was staying. I had to close my nostrils. There was no gradual build-up to it, no faint odour growing stronger with every step. It was simply there, all at once, the way a wall is there before you have decided to stop walking.
I did not think much of it that first morning. It was a new city, an unfamiliar lane, and perhaps an isolated problem. It was only a few days later, during an evening walk near the old Rangaraya Medical College with Dr Chandrashekhar, that the possibility of it being an isolated problem disappeared. A channel ran along the hospital boundary wall, carrying the same smell I had encountered on my first morning. Dr Chandrashekhar mentioned, almost without emphasis, that it had been running in much the same condition for as long as he could remember from his days as a student there. It was not a bad week or a bad season. It appeared to have become a permanent feature of the landscape, much like the old building itself.
That was enough to make me look beyond the particular lane and examine the administrative record behind what I was seeing. What emerged was a striking difference between the city described in official documents and the city experienced at street level.
What the Records Say
On paper, Kakinada Municipal Corporation presents a considerably different picture. The Andhra Pradesh State Portal has credited it with “exemplary waste management practices”, while the corporation has received national recognition under the Swachh Bharat Mission. Kakinada has also been part of the Government of India’s Smart Cities Mission for more than a decade. Initiatives such as “Return Gift” and “Legacy Waste Management” have been undertaken and publicly presented as evidence of the city’s continuing efforts towards urban improvement.
None of these claims is imaginary. The programmes exist, the recognitions exist and the expenditure associated with them can be traced through government records. The difficulty begins when that official picture is placed alongside the physical condition of parts of the city. A city may receive recognition for particular programmes and still have fundamental deficiencies in other areas of civic infrastructure. The question, therefore, is not whether Kakinada has achieved anything. It clearly has. The question is whether those achievements correspond to the conditions experienced by all sections of its population.
The Drainage Question
In several pockets of Kakinada, drainage channels function as open sewers, carrying wastewater along roads and residential settlements. In some places, families live only a few feet from them. The problem is particularly difficult to reconcile with the city’s Smart City status because Kakinada still does not have a functioning underground drainage system serving the city as a whole. More than a decade after its inclusion in the Smart Cities Mission, residents in substantial parts of the city continue to depend upon open drains that were designed primarily for storm-water disposal but have come to carry domestic wastewater as well.
The problem is therefore larger than the smell that first drew my attention to it. An open drain running beside a road may be dismissed as an ordinary feature of an Indian town, but the persistence of such a system in a city that has spent years within a national urban-modernisation programme raises a legitimate question about priorities, implementation and accountability. If underground drainage has long been recognised as necessary, why has the city continued to function without it for so many years?
When Infrastructure Becomes a Health Risk
The consequences of this deficit fall most heavily on the people who live closest to these channels. In several areas, low-income families live beside open drains, sometimes with infants and young children only a few feet from wastewater. Stagnant water and accumulated waste create conditions favourable to mosquito breeding and increase exposure to vector-borne diseases. The risks become particularly serious when drainage channels overflow during periods of heavy rainfall and contaminated water enters residential surroundings.
There is another vulnerability that receives less attention because it is not immediately visible. Where drinking-water pipelines run close to contaminated drainage channels, leakage or damage to either system can create the possibility of contamination. Municipal assessments have themselves identified the need to examine drinking-water pipelines in vulnerable areas. This is not a reason to predict a particular epidemic, but it is sufficient reason to regard the existing arrangement as a public-health concern requiring systematic inspection, monitoring and corrective action.
The people most exposed to these conditions are also often those with the least capacity to change them. A family living beside an open drain cannot simply move to another neighbourhood because the municipal infrastructure has failed. For a child growing up there, the drain is not an occasional civic inconvenience. It is part of the environment in which childhood takes place.
A Pattern Beyond the Drains
The drainage problem does not appear in isolation. Other aspects of Kakinada’s civic infrastructure reveal a similar distance between stated policy and conditions visible on the ground.
Despite years of sanitation campaigns, garbage remains visible along several suburban roads and thoroughfares. Where waste collection and decentralised processing do not function consistently, roadside accumulation and open burning become recurring problems. Irrigation canals that once formed an important part of the region’s agricultural landscape have, in stretches, become receptacles for solid waste and other pollutants. Traffic, damaged roads, construction activity and dust add another layer to the environmental burden.
Each of these problems can be assigned to a different department and explained as a local deficiency. Considered together, however, they raise a broader question about the way urban development is planned and measured. A city can produce successful projects, receive awards and report measurable improvements while significant parts of its population continue to live with infrastructure that should have disappeared decades ago.
This is where the idea of a Smart City becomes more complicated than a designation or a collection of projects. The quality of a city is ultimately experienced through its ordinary infrastructure: the water that reaches a household, the drainage that carries away its wastewater, the waste collected from its street, the air a child breathes and the roads people use every day.
Where Did the Investment Go?
The state’s recent approach to the Centre for approximately ₹200 crore under the Urban Infrastructure Development Fund for the construction of an underground drainage system in Kakinada makes the question more immediate. If approved and implemented, the funding could finally address one of the city’s most persistent infrastructure deficits. Yet the proposal inevitably raises another question: after more than a decade of Smart Cities Mission activity, alongside state municipal funding and sanitation programmes, why does Kakinada still require a fresh major intervention for infrastructure as fundamental as an underground drainage network?
That question is not, by itself, an allegation of financial wrongdoing. Establishing such a conclusion would require a detailed examination of financial and administrative records. But those records should be available for public scrutiny. How much has been sanctioned for Kakinada’s urban infrastructure during the past decade? How much has actually been released and spent? Which projects were approved, which were completed and which remain incomplete? What were their original estimates and revised costs? Which agencies were responsible for implementation and supervision? What explains the gap between projects announced and infrastructure actually delivered?
These are not unreasonable questions to ask of public institutions. They become particularly important when the physical condition of a city appears so different from the impression created by its official achievements. The answers should come from records rather than speculation, and responsibility should be established through those records rather than through political accusation.
What Accountability Requires
An independent sanitation and infrastructure audit would be an appropriate starting point. It should cover the city’s suburban and low-income settlements as well as the areas that receive greater visibility in official assessments, and it should be conducted independently of the municipal machinery whose performance is being examined. Its findings should be made publicly accessible, including the condition of drainage networks, waste-management systems, water pipelines and canal infrastructure.
The proposed underground drainage project should then have a transparent implementation schedule, with defined areas of coverage, expenditure, timelines and institutional responsibility. Progress should be measured not merely by administrative expenditure or project announcements but by the actual number of households connected to a functioning system.
The families already living along open drainage channels also cannot be treated as an incidental part of the infrastructure problem. Where rehabilitation becomes necessary, it should provide secure housing, sanitation, water supply and access to essential civic services rather than simply relocating people from one inadequate environment to another.
None of these demands is extraordinary. They are basic requirements of a city that wishes to describe itself as modern, sustainable and liveable. The issue is ultimately one of closing the distance between what has been promised, what has been reported and what residents actually experience.
The City Beyond the Smart City Tag
I am writing this from my balcony in Mysuru, days after returning from Kakinada, fresh from a nebulisation session that I now need each evening. Somewhere amid the smoke, dust and open drains of Kakinada, I developed a respiratory infection severe enough to require treatment. I cannot establish from my experience alone what caused it, and I do not intend to. My experience is simply the reason the environmental conditions I witnessed no longer remain an abstract matter for me. I was a visitor. I left. For many of the families I saw living beside those drains, particularly the children growing up there, these conditions are not something encountered during a short stay and left behind with the next train. They are part of everyday life.
Looking at a clearer sky from my balcony, I keep returning to the question of what a Smart City should actually mean. It cannot mean only the projects that appear in presentations, the awards displayed in offices or the statistics recorded in reports. A city is experienced at street level, beside the drains, along the roads, near the canals and inside the homes of the people who live there. A child’s access to clean air, clean water and basic sanitation should not depend on which municipal corporation happens to govern the street on which that child was born.
I hope this reaches the desks for which it is intended. I hope it is read as a record of what I saw, followed by questions that the responsible institutions can answer through facts and records. The purpose is not to condemn Kakinada. It is to ask whether the city that exists on paper is the same city in which its people are actually living.
