Next infrastructure revolution will happen underground

This article is authored by Divanshu Kumar, founder & CEO, Solinas Integrity.

Here is a simple question: "How do you get your water?" Almost everyone answers the same way — "from my RO purifier" or "from the filter at home." Almost no one mentions the hundreds of kilometres of underground pipelines that delivered that water to their building in the first place.

Infra

That blind spot is not trivial. It is the reason why, in Germany or the Netherlands, you can drink directly from the tap, and in India, you cannot. We tend to frame that as a water quality problem. It is, more precisely, an infrastructure integrity problem, one that lives underground, out of sight, and almost entirely out of mind.

India has built impressively in the last decade. Highways, metro networks, airports. These are visible and celebratory. But the infrastructure that actually determines whether a city is liveable, its water pipelines, sewer systems, stormwater drains, remains largely unmapped, unmonitored, and managed reactively.

The reason is simple: We cannot see it. A leaking water pipeline does not announce itself. A damaged sewer line does not reveal its condition until it overflows. A blocked stormwater drain becomes visible only when a city floods. By the time these failures surface, the damage is done — water losses, contamination, disruption to communities, and in too many cases, the continued practice of manual scavenging because we lack both the diagnostic layer and the technology to replace it.

The central lesson is this: Visibility changes everything. Infrastructure problems that traditionally took weeks to locate can now be detected within hours using robotic inspection and AI-enabled analysis. Cities can make decisions based on actual condition data rather than assumptions, and our indigenous datasets can predict when pipelines are likely to fail, before they do.

The second lesson is harder: Technology alone will not fix this. Every city we work in is different, the age of its network, the accuracy of its records, its soil conditions. A solution that works in Coimbatore will need significant adaptation in Patna. The robots and software matter, but contextual understanding of the network, the city, and the operator is what determines whether an intervention actually holds. That is also why these solutions must be built in India, not imported.

This is the right moment to build. The central government has allocated billions across AMRUT, Jal Jeevan Mission, and urban sanitation schemes. Water is now a climate and policy priority, not just a civic one. Private operators and EPC firms are no longer just constructing assets — they are being held accountable for operating them. Contracts are shifting from pure capex to operations and maintenance models, which means, for the first time, the financial incentive to understand what lies underground is real.

India is at an inflection point. We can continue building visible infrastructure on top of invisible decay, or we can invest in the diagnostic and management layer that makes all of it sustainable. The next revolution that matters most will happen underground. It's time for builders to build for visibility.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Divanshu Kumar, founder & CEO, Solinas Integrity.