Why dont we have good roads in India?

Recently, on a car journey in Melbourne, I was admiring the roads of Australia. Being a Mumbaikar, I am not used to smooth roads devoid of potholes that are not dug every few centimeters. Australia, is the first country I have traveled to outside India and hence I have only the Mumbai roads to compare with. Seeing the poor conditions of the roads in our country, I always thought that probably it was a soil issue that supposedly good quality roads were full of potholes during rainy season and that most of the roads were forever going through repair work.

This time I was traveling with a civil engineer who has worked on road construction projects in US, Pune and now in Melbourne. I asked him is corruption really the reason for our roads to be so bad or it has something to do with the texture of our soil or any such technicality? I always like to give a person the benefit of doubt and though I know that road construction projects involve huge kickbacks between contractors and politicians, I still believed that probably something was naturally wrong with our roads. He said that corruption is the only reason for poor roads in India. He says he was exasperated with the corruption while working in India and didn't want to continue in such an environment. In most of the cases, there are under the table deals while rewarding the contracts and probably the contractors lose so much money in bribing that they compensate by using sub standard material for building the roads. And more repair work means more revenue for them, so more the number of repairs needed, better the business.

Other than this, I think there is no reason that why Mumbai, which is the financial capital of India should have such a poor infrastructure and be challenged by rains year after year. Its sad that corruption takes away so much of the taxpayer's money and we have to forcefully accept such conditions. Sometimes I wish I would have done law. I would sue the government and contractor for every poor road in Mumbai and for causing irreversible damage to my back by traveling on them.