India’s recurring waterborne disease outbreaks are often treated as unfortunate but isolated lapses—local failures caused by ageing pipes, human error, or sudden contamination. The deaths in Indore in early January 2026, expose how misleading that framing is. What unfolded in Bhagirathpura locality was not an accident but the foreseeable consequence of a governance model that prizes visible cleanliness, numerical coverage, and rankings over the fundamental public health obligation of delivering safe drinking water. Indore’s tragedy forces a hard question: what does cleanliness mean if a city’s taps deliver sewage?
Early warning
Between late December 2025 and the first week of January 2026, residents of Bhagirathpura began reporting foul-smelling, discoloured, bitter-tasting water from municipal taps. Complaints were made repeatedly, but they were treated as routine supply disturbances. Only when people began collapsing—children, elderly residents, and entire families suffering acute diarrhoea, vomiting, and dehydration—did authorities respond with urgency. Official figures acknowledge at least 7–10 deaths; opposition leaders, hospital staff, and local reporters put the number higher, between 14 and 17. Hundreds were hospitalised, several in intensive care, and emergency health teams were deployed to survey thousands of households.
Laboratory tests subsequently confirmed faecal contamination, including Escherichia coli, a pathogen that should never be present in treated drinking water and whose detection unequivocally signals sewage intrusion. Investigations traced the contamination to leaking drinking water pipelines laid dangerously close to sewer lines, compounded by the construction of a public toilet directly above a water main. These are not marginal lapses; they represent violations of basic engineering and public health safeguards.
Engineering failures
To understand why such tragedies recur, one must look beneath the streets—quite literally. Most Indian cities run intermittent water supply systems, leaving pipelines depressurised for long hours. During these low-pressure phases, even small cracks or loose joints can suck in surrounding wastewater—especially in dense areas where sewage saturates the soil.
The risk intensifies when drinking water and sewer lines are laid too close together or intersect, a common outcome of unplanned urbanisation and retrofitting around ageing pipes. Leaking sewers contaminate the ground, and during pressure drops, pathogen-laden effluent is drawn directly into water mains. Once sewage enters the distribution network beyond treatment plants, chlorination offers little protection.
Ageing infrastructure, corrosion, poor leak detection, and weak pressure monitoring compound these failures. Together, intermittent supply and unsafe co-location of water and sewer lines turn routine engineering lapses into public health disasters. These risks are well known. India’s Central Public Health & Environmental Engineering Organisation’s manuals and World Health Organization guidelines mandate strict physical separation and pressure maintenance to prevent contamination. Violating these norms is not ambiguity but negligence—embedding risk into everyday urban service delivery.
Not an exception
What makes Indore exceptional is not the failure itself, but the illusion of success surrounding it. Across India, similar outbreaks have occurred with alarming regularity. Ahmedabad has recorded over 3.2 lakh complaints of water contamination in just five years, alongside repeated outbreaks of diarrhoea, jaundice, typhoid, and cholera linked to leaking municipal pipelines. Jaipur and Lucknow have documented hepatitis E outbreaks associated with sewer intrusion into drinking water lines. Bengaluru, Gandhinagar, Greater Noida, Ranchi, and several other cities have reported episodes of sewage-smelling tap water followed by spikes in gastrointestinal illness.
Nationally, the numbers are stark. Government and epidemiological estimates suggest that around 2 lakh Indians die every year due to unsafe water and inadequate sanitation. India’s death rate from unsafe water—about 35 deaths per 100,000 people—is more than three times the global average. These deaths are not acts of nature; they are the cumulative outcome of policy decisions that tolerate unsafe water as an acceptable risk.
The Swachh Survekshan Paradox
Indore’s repeated coronation as India’s “cleanest city” under Swachh Survekshan makes the recent tragedy deeply unsettling. The rankings have undoubtedly driven improvements in solid waste management, street cleanliness, and toilet coverage across urban India. Yet they have also narrowed the idea of cleanliness to what is most visible, easily documented, and readily scored.
Swachh Survekshan places disproportionate emphasis on solid waste handling, surface sanitation, documentation, and citizen perception surveys. What it largely sidelines are the factors that actually safeguard human life: the microbial quality of drinking water, the age and integrity of underground pipelines, pressure stability in water networks, sewer overflows, and long-term trends in waterborne disease. Also, much of the data feeding into these rankings is self-reported by municipalities, with limited independent verification. Meanwhile, citizen feedback disproportionately captures the voices of digitally connected, relatively affluent residents, while informal settlements—often the most exposed to unsafe water—remain structurally underrepresented.
This distortion is compounded by sanitation infrastructure that prioritises construction over containment. Toilets built without adequate sewerage or faecal-sludge treatment systems increase contamination pressure on groundwater and drinking water networks. In dense urban and peri-urban areas, poorly constructed septic tanks, unsafe sludge disposal practices, and congested underground corridors—where water supply and sewer lines run side by side—create ideal conditions for cross-contamination.
From a scientific standpoint, sanitation and drinking water safety are inseparable. From an administrative standpoint, however, they continue to be treated as parallel, siloed achievements—allowing systemic risks to slip through institutional gaps.
The result is a paradoxical outcome: a city can score high on national dashboards while its drinking-water infrastructure quietly deteriorates underground. Indore illustrates the danger of this distortion all too clearly.
Access without assurance
India’s Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) represents one of the most ambitious drinking water infrastructure expansions in the world. Rural tap coverage has reportedly risen from about 17% in 2019 to over 80% by late 2025. Yet parliamentary committees and independent studies have repeatedly flagged concerns about data authenticity, weak operation and maintenance, and persistent water quality problems in thousands of habitations.
The Indore crisis underscores a broader truth: access and safety are not interchangeable. A functional tap connection that delivers contaminated water does not improve health outcomes; it amplifies risk. By prioritising coverage numbers over verified water quality, governance frameworks risk scaling the very vulnerabilities that caused Indore’s tragedy.
Also Read: The water divide: On water contamination, piped water supply in India
What must change
If the deaths in Indore are to mean more than passing outrage, India must rethink how it measures success in water and sanitation. Public health outcomes—not visual cleanliness or ranking scores—must be central. This follows directly from Constitutional obligation, not administrative preference.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to life under Article 21 includes access to safe drinking water. The National Human Rights Commission has likewise found that failure to provide safe water, particularly where negligence leads to preventable deaths, constitutes a human rights violation. Water contamination incidents, therefore, are not routine lapses but breaches that demand accountability.
This requires practical reform: real-time, ward-level disclosure of drinking water quality from independent laboratories; a gradual transition to continuous, pressurised water supply to prevent sewage ingress; and risk-based replacement of ageing pipelines, especially where water and sewer lines run in close proximity, in violation of CPHEEO and WHO norms. Public health surveillance must be integrated with water operations so disease spikes trigger immediate testing and corrective action.
The families in Bhagirathpura trusted the municipal tap. It failed them. A city cannot be clean if its water is unsafe, nor can sanitation success be claimed while preventable deaths persist. Indore should be remembered not for its rankings, but as a warning against confusing appearance with outcome.
(Dr. Sudheer Kumar Shukla is an environmental scientist and sustainability expert. He currently serves as head-think tank at Mobius Foundation, New Delhi. sudheerkrshukla@gmail.com)
