Clean cities, serving poisoned water

The drinking water contamination episode in Indore’s Bhagirathpura area has exposed, once again, a fault line in India’s public services that glossy dashboards and ambitious slogans have failed to bridge. While official figures on fatalities remain contested, with authorities confirming four deaths and other public representatives citing higher numbers, the core facts are no longer in dispute. Sewage entered a drinking water pipeline, hundreds fell ill with diarrhoea and vomiting, and a neighbourhood paid a heavy price for a preventable failure.

That this happened in Indore, a city repeatedly showcased as a model of urban governance and cleanliness, underlines a deeper truth. Access to safe drinking water in India is not merely a question of infrastructure expansion. It is about governance, maintenance, accountability and the uneasy gap between national policy ambition and local execution.

Cases of illness were first reported in late December in Bhagirathpura. Subsequent investigations by local authorities found that contamination occurred after drainage water mixed with the potable supply due to a pipeline leakage. Water samples were collected and sent for laboratory testing, which confirmed bacterial contamination consistent with sewage ingress. Supply was restored only after repairs were carried out.

The death toll remains a matter of official verification. The Madhya Pradesh government has acknowledged four confirmed deaths linked to the outbreak, while the Indore mayor and local residents have cited higher numbers. The National Human Rights Commission has taken suo motu cognisance of the incident and sought a report from the state government, signalling that the issue goes beyond routine administrative lapse and touches on the right to life and public health.

The confusion itself is instructive. When citizens and authorities speak in different numbers, trust erodes. For families affected by the tragedy, precision matters not only for compensation but for credibility.

The Indore episode comes at a time when India’s drinking water policy is being publicly celebrated for scale and speed. The flagship Jal Jeevan Mission, launched in 2019, aims to provide functional household tap connections with potable water to all rural households. According to Press Information Bureau data, rural tap water coverage has risen from about 17 per cent at the start of the Mission to over 80 per cent by late 2025, with more than 15 crore connections added.

The Mission’s design does not ignore quality. Guidelines allow up to 2 per cent of funds to be spent on water quality monitoring, laboratory strengthening and surveillance. Thousands of testing laboratories are operational across states, and field testing kits are meant to enable regular local checks. New assessment tools such as Jal Seva Aankalan seek to shift focus from mere connections to service delivery.

Parallel urban initiatives, including AMRUT 2.0, emphasise sewage treatment, reuse of treated wastewater and reduction of environmental contamination. On paper, the architecture recognises that safe drinking water depends as much on sanitation and distribution integrity as on source augmentation.

Yet Indore shows that the existence of programmes does not automatically translate into safe outcomes.

A crucial distinction often lost in public debate is that the Jal Jeevan Mission is primarily a rural programme. Urban drinking water systems remain under municipal corporations and state urban departments, governed by a fragmented institutional framework. Coverage figures are less standardised, quality monitoring is uneven, and accountability is diffused.

Urban water pipelines in many Indian cities are old, poorly mapped and vulnerable to leakage. Intermittent supply creates negative pressure in pipes, increasing the risk of sewage intrusion when cracks or illegal connections exist. Maintenance budgets are often the first casualty of fiscal stress, while repairs tend to be reactive rather than preventive.

Indore’s case fits this pattern. The problem was not absence of supply but failure of separation between sewage and drinking water networks, a basic engineering requirement. Such failures are more likely in dense, lower income neighbourhoods where infrastructure is stressed and political attention is episodic.

One of the central lessons from Indore is the danger of equating access with safety. A tap connection, whether rural or urban, does not guarantee potable water. Official metrics largely track infrastructure creation, not continuous quality assurance.

The author is a policy commentator on urban development, sustainability and public governance, with a focus on how planning, infrastructure and environmental choices affect citizens’ daily lives.