The safety of the foundations of submerged hydraulic structures due to excessive local scour is threatened by the erosive action of the waves and currents passing around these structures. Fish and aquatic habitat is seriously affected due to the modification of the flow field caused by these submerged structures. Hence, the problems of flow characteristics and erosion around submerged structures were investigated by various researchers. A comprehensive discussion of the investigations on flow characteristics and local scour due to steady currents and waves around vertical submerged structures are presented, which comprises scour process, dimensional analysis, parameters influencing scour, temporal evolution of scour, flow field, flow visualization techniques, variation of bed shear stress, scour depth determination formulas and scour countermeasures.Although past investigations establish the effect of various parameters on scour around vertical submerged structures for live and clear water condition, yet further studies are required to analyze the scour around group of submerged structures for various bed sediments, understand the flow physics around the group and upscale the model results for the prototype.