India is moving from standards- and inspection-based dam safety toward risk-informed management under the Dam Safety Act, 2021, and the Dam Rehabilitation and Improvement Project. This transition creates a timely opportunity to use domestic and international failure experience as credible evidence for Potential Failure Mode Analysis (PFMA). The paper examines how failures, serious incidents, and near misses can be converted into transferable PFMA inputs through structured forensic reconstruction. An author-compiled screening register of 52 documented Indian failures and serious incidents from 1917 to 2023 was used descriptively, recognizing inconsistent terminology, incomplete records, and the absence of exposurenormalized national data. Representative cases Machhu II, Panshet–Khadakwasla, Teesta III, Teton, and Oroville show that useful PFMA evidence requires the initiating load, adverse condition, physical mechanism, progression pathway, observable precursors, intervention opportunities, consequence pathway, and evidence confidence. The paper demonstrates that the Dam Safety Act already provides an enabling basis through provisions for incident records, failure investigation, comprehensive safety evaluation, risk assessment, risk management, and cascading-dam coordination. A failure-informed PFMA framework is proposed, supported by mandatory forensic protocols, a national failure-and-incident database, dam-typespecific failure-mode libraries, and integration with comprehensive evaluations and DRIP rehabilitation planning. The framework is intended to improve the prioritization of investigations, monitoring, rehabilitation, operation, and emergency preparedness.