The Future of Public Infrastructure Is Autonomous

The man in the manhole

Somewhere in India right now, a man is climbing into a manhole. No safety gear. No backup. Just him, the dark, and whatever is waiting below methane, hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide. Gases that knock you out in seconds and kill you in minutes.

This happens every day. Across hundreds of cities. In a country that has a law against it.

The law has existed since 1993. Then they rewrote it in 2013. The Supreme Court stepped in again in 2023. And last year, 2024, was the deadliest year on record at least 116 people died cleaning sewers and septic tanks. That's more than two a week. Every week. All year.

Three weeks ago, three men in their early thirties climbed into a hospital septic tank in Raipur. Twenty feet deep. They were promised ₹7,000 each about 85 dollars. None of them came out.

Between 2019 and 2023: 377 deaths. Between 2021 and 2025: 315 deaths, confirmed in Parliament this March. Since 1993 the year this was first made illegal, 1,313 documented sewer deaths. And everyone working in this field will tell you that number is a serious undercount.

Seven lakh people are still doing this work today. 97% of them are marginalized communities. That's not a coincidence. That's a centuries-old assignment of the most degrading labour, now hidden behind contractor tenders and municipal outsourcing so nobody has to officially admit it's still happening.

On June 29, 2025, the Indian government told Parliament: "No death has been reported due to Manual Scavenging." That same week, a government department in Delhi posted photos on social media of workers submerged in sewage without any protective gear. They deleted the post when people got angry. The workers stayed in the sewage.

We have the technology to fix this. Robots that can map, navigate, and clean sewer lines exist right now. We built one. Others exist across the world. This isn't a research problem anymore.

So the question I keep coming back to is simple: if the law didn't stop it, the courts didn't stop it, and the deaths didn't stop it what will?

The infrastructure beneath your feet is invisible until it fails

Most people never think about what keeps a city running. The sewer lines under the road. The water pipelines that haven't been mapped in 30 years. The bridges that were last inspected when your parents were young.

Infrastructure failures like a burst pipeline, a blocked sewer, or a weakened structure carry enormous costs, both human and economic. And with growing urban populations, manual approaches simply can't keep pace anymore.

The problem isn't just about danger. It's about scale. India's infrastructure network is too vast, too old, and too complex to be maintained by people alone. We need systems that can go where humans shouldn't, see what humans can't, and work without stopping.

What robots are actually doing right now

This isn't conceptual. Robots are already operating in India's infrastructure, quietly, without much fanfare.

Companies like Solinas Robotics have been working since 2018, deploying robotic crawlers into sewer lines, water pipelines, and stormwater drains across Indian cities, using AI-powered defect detection to spot cracks, blockages, corrosion, and contamination with a level of accuracy no human inspection team can match.

Drone-based systems have been deployed post-cyclone in Odisha, used by Indian Railways for track inspection, and by GAIL for pipeline surveillance, not as pilots or experiments, but as operational tools that agencies now depend on.

Industrial drones equipped with advanced sensors, autonomous navigation, and AI-enabled analytics are transforming infrastructure inspection, doing in hours what used to take days, with far less risk to human life.

The shift is already happening. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Why this matters more in India than anywhere else

Every country faces infrastructure maintenance challenges. But India's version of the problem is uniquely difficult.

The sheer diversity of it, pipelines from different eras, sewer systems with no documentation, bridges built to different standards, means no single off-the-shelf solution works everywhere.

The robots that operate in India need to be resilient, adaptable, and built for conditions that would break imported technology.

This is actually India's edge. Indian robotics doesn't design for showcase. It designs for sustainability, cost-effective, frugal, built to survive real-world conditions that most labs never simulate.

The companies solving India's infrastructure problems are almost by definition building technology that can work anywhere in the world. That's a competitive advantage no one talks about enough.

The honest challenges

Anyone telling you this transition is smooth is selling something.

Regulatory frameworks around drone deployments and autonomous systems in public spaces are still catching up. Many municipalities don't have the digital maps or baseline data that robots need to operate effectively. And there's a real, legitimate concern about what happens to the workers currently doing these jobs.

NITI Aayog has been clear on this. Technology must not replace human skills, it must amplify them. The goal of infrastructure robotics isn't to eliminate workers. It's to stop sending them into places that kill them, and redirect their skills toward work that doesn't.

That's a transition that needs planning, investment, and political will. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

Where this is going

The intelligent robotics segment, covering AI-enabled autonomous systems, is projected to grow from USD 14 billion in 2025 to USD 50 billion by 2030. That's not a speculative number. It's driven by safety regulations, ageing infrastructure, and the simple reality that labour-based approaches to hazardous maintenance are becoming legally and morally untenable.

India is not behind on this curve. In many ways, the pressure of India's infrastructure challenges has pushed Indian companies to innovate faster and more practically than their global counterparts.

The man climbing into the manhole, his story doesn't have to end the way it too often does. The technology to change it already exists. The question now is purely about deployment, will, and speed.

At GenRobotics, we build AI-powered robotic systems for exactly the environments described in this piece. If you're working on infrastructure challenges in municipalities, utilities, or government, we'd like to talk.