‘Great sorrow’: The project that made Jyotiraditya Scindia lose his cool

But the project has faced scrutiny over delays and rising expenditure. At a hearing in July, the Madhya Pradesh High Court questioned whether the spending was warranted on a project that had left the city’s sewage problems unresolved.

The district administration, meanwhile, has said the project cannot be implemented due to lack of funds.

“I said in the meeting that the project is not doable,” Shivpuri Collector Arpit Verma told The Indian Express, adding: “A separate investigation by the concerned department is underway to fix responsibility of the errant officials”.

Shivpuri sewage project and court scrutiny

Shivpuri’s sewage historically flowed into Jadhav Sagar and then downstream water bodies. The Shivpuri sewerage project was conceived to develop a sewer network, sewage-pumping infrastructure and a sewage treatment plant to counter the resultant water pollution.

The project was originally sanctioned in 2013 at Rs 69.51 crore. It was subsequently revised to Rs 92 crore and then underwent a third revision, taking the estimated project cost to Rs 113.42 crore.

The PHE attributed the increase to additional excavation, changes in the sewer alignment, road restoration, higher permission costs and other execution-related expenses.

But as the project progressed, its weaknesses became apparent. The central problem was that the sewer network and treatment plant were not effectively connected to the households generating the sewage.

In proceedings before the Madhya Pradesh High Court, the state told the court that the sewage treatment plant had been constructed in 2019 but never became operational because sewage was not reaching it. The state also said individual household connections were the responsibility of the Shivpuri Municipal Council and had not been included in the original NLCP project.

That omission became central to the High Court’s scrutiny. In its June 24, 2026 order, the court questioned why a complete sewerage project had not been planned when the authorities knew that sewer lines without household connections would have no effective source of sewage. The Bench said spending Rs 111 crore on such a system could amount to a “wastage of Public Money”, and questioned why the Environmental Planning and Coordination Organisation had allowed the expenditure when the project could provide “without even 1% benefit to the citizens of Shivpuri.”

In an earlier order, after being told that the STP had been built in 2019 but remained idle, the Bench recorded that the PHE appeared to have spent about Rs 110 crore and then allowed it to remain unused.

The court observed that, “prima facie, it appears that the P.H.E Department, after wasting Rs.110 crores, was sitting idle”, leaving the STP without any benefit to the city’s residents. It also questioned why payments had been made for laying the sewer network without first verifying whether the lines had been constructed according to specifications, including the required slope.

The court subsequently described the project as an “exemplary case of poor planning and equally bad execution”, saying it had exceeded its execution period by several years and spent multiple times its initial project cost while still failing to connect household sewage to trunk lines for treatment at the STP.

The court-directed record said the problem would require fresh planning and additional resources.

‘Evasive’ officials

At the July 27 hearing, a Division Bench of Justices G.S. Ahluwalia and Anuradha Shukla took exception to the response of senior government officials to the court’s demand for accountability over the reported wastage of Rs 111 crore.

The court had earlier directed the Additional Chief Secretary, Urban Development and Housing Department, Sanjay Dubey, to personally examine the seized records and fix accountability for the officers responsible for the “wastage of huge funds”. Dubey subsequently sought exemption from appearing, arguing that the Principal Secretary, Public Health Engineering Department, was the competent authority to fix liability and that the ACS was not an expert on the technical aspects of the project.

The Bench was sharply critical of that position, recording that Dubey’s application “has made it clear that he does not want to involve himself even for conducting a preliminary enquiry” into the sanctioning of an incomplete sewage-line and sewage-treatment project. The court said the project had not been executed according to specifications and had resulted not only in contaminated water being supplied to Shivpuri residents but also in “extensive damage to forest property.”

The court was equally scathing about the response of Alka Upadhyay, then executive director of the Environmental Planning and Coordination Organisation (EPCO), on why an incomplete project had been sanctioned. The reply, the court said, “clearly shows that she has also adopted an evasive way to run away from her liabilities and responsibilities”, and imposed a cost of Rs 20,000, warning of recovery proceedings and contempt action.

The court also ordered the state to submit a final report listing the “liabilities and accountabilities of persons who are responsible for the complete failure of sewage lines”, citing the fundamental rights of Shivpuri residents and the interests of the public exchequer.