If they didn’t use sub-standard materials, there wouldn’t be big repair contracts, would there? Guess who will land them.

This is par for the course in India. They siphon off taxes this way, and on environmentally-inadvisable things no less. But that is how it is structured, weak-to-non-existent urban local bodies, and tax collection and disbursement centralized like it was in the times of the colonizer. That big pot of money is intensively fought over.