Judicial intervention in infrastructure projects raises complex questions about the separation of powers and project accountability. Analyse with reference to the Karnataka HC's BMIC verdict.

On 9 January 2026, a Division Bench of the Karnataka High Court directed the State to scrap the 111-km Bengaluru–Mysuru Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) after 25 years yielded barely 1 km of expressway [1]. The verdict tests where judicial review of executive inaction ends and judicial policymaking begins.

The verdict decomposed

• The 1995 Project Technical Report promised a 111-km expressway and five townships; roughly 1 km of expressway and zero townships were delivered [1].
• The Bench traced failure to large-scale corruption, bureaucratic trapping and litigation, noting over 2,000 pending cases [1].
• Land was taken under the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894 — compensation paid, assets undelivered — a double loss to landowner and exchequer.

Separation-of-powers concerns

• Ordering abandonment of a project enters the executive's policy domain: viability, contract renegotiation and fiscal trade-offs lack judicially manageable standards.
• The concessionaire's contractual and property interests under Article 300A cut both ways; a scrapping order may generate fresh litigation rather than closure — the order is itself now under appellate scrutiny.
• Courts are institutionally ill-equipped to supervise sunk costs, sequencing and financing.

The accountability case for intervention

• Where responsibility is diffused across PWD, Urban Development and Revenue departments, no organ owns the outcome; the court becomes the residual forum, invoking public trust.
• The Kelkar Committee (2015) flagged inequitable risk allocation and unresolved "actionable stress" in stalled PPPs, recommending an independent roads regulator and a renegotiation mechanism — an institutional vacuum the judiciary was left to fill [2].
• LARR, 2013 — with Social Impact Assessment and consent thresholds for PPP acquisitions — addresses precisely the pre-2013 deficits BMIC exposed [3].

Reassembled, the BMIC verdict is less an encroachment than a symptom: judicial activism expands where executive accountability contracts. The durable remedy lies in statutory renegotiation and dispute-resolution machinery, independent sectoral regulators, and time-bound corridor governance of the kind institutionalised under the National Industrial Corridor Programme [4] — restoring to the executive the delivery role that constitutional design assigns it.