On the surface, Indore was India’s cleanest city. But underneath…

Between December 24, 2025, and January 6 this year, at least eight people died after allegedly drinking contaminated water in Indore’s Bhagirathpura. A public toilet without the mandatory septic tank, built over an ageing pipeline near a police outpost in the area, was initially blamed for the contamination of the city’s drinking water network. Even as the toilet has since been demolished, the authorities are investigating whether the contamination spread through the local borewell connections.

Government officials drink from water tankers to assuage contamination fears. (Photo by Anand Mohan J)

On Tuesday, the Madhya Pradesh government confirmed at least eight deaths before the High Court. According to health officials, 310 patients have been admitted to hospitals since December 24, 2025. Of these, 203 are still in hospital, including 25 in intensive care units.

As authorities hurriedly mobilised health workers for door-to-door screenings in the densely packed Bhagirathpura, initiated disciplinary action against the officials concerned and attempted to contain the contamination, a different story emerged — one of ageing pipelines unable to keep up any more, of documented structural gaps and a municipal system that repeatedly failed to act despite obvious warnings.

Pipelines vs population

A day after Dilip Kumar Yadav, a 2014 batch IAS officer, was relieved of charge as the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) Commissioner on January 2 this year — he had taken charge in September 2025 — his batchmate Kshitij Singhal was parachuted into the city in the midst of one its biggest known civic crises.

Singhal, who was earlier with the Ujjain Municipal Corporation, now has on his hands the arduous task of restoring the city’s faith in the municipal water supply.

Workers setting up a new water pipeline in the affected area. (Special Arrangement)

“We are tracking the source of contamination in the borewell system. The pollution board has examined nearby industries for leaks. The pipeline network that allowed the contamination to spread is under review too. We are also investigating why the work to replace the pipes progressed so slowly,” Singhal tells The Indian Express.

Not just Singhal, the crisis is unprecedented for Indore too. Before 1920, Indore drew its water the way cities had for millennia: from wells near ponds and rivers, and the nearby Bilawali lake, said officials.

By 1939, before Indore became what it is today — the crowning jewel of the ruling BJP, home to some of the most powerful corporates in India, and a city of clean roads where Rolls Royce and Ferraris are common sights — the Yashwant Sagar freshwater reservoir became its primary water source. With its dam holding enough water to serve a growing population, this arrangement sufficed for nearly four decades, officials said.

Though the foundation of the solution to Indore’s demographic pressures was laid by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in April 1961 with the inauguration of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada, phase-I of the project was implemented only in 1978. Under phase-I, 85 million litres (MLD) of water was pumped into Indore’s distribution network. Phase-II, launched in 1991-92, added another 95 MLD.

However, pipelines laid in those years, many of them in urban slums like Bhagirathpura, were not designed to meet the needs of a snowballing population.

In 2008, under phase-III of Project Uday, financed by the Asian Development Bank, 360 MLD from the Narmada was pumped into Indore. The largest infrastructure expansion yet, it created a bifurcated city: areas with modern trunk lines capable of sustained pressure, and others with old pipelines that delivered water in hour-long bursts, their metal fatigued, joints corroded and their capacity to withstand continuous flow depleted.

Workers working on a new water pipeline in Bhagirathpura. (photo by Anand Mohan J)

“These (old pipeline) systems were never designed for today’s pressure, population load or continuous supply,” says an area engineer overseeing water infrastructure.

Another engineer adds, “Newer areas have pipes made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) that are chemically resistant and built to last a century. In older neighbourhoods, water flows through asbestos-cement pipes that are safe when intact but release hazardous fibres when damaged.”

Indore’s current population exceeds 30 lakh. By 2040, it is projected to reach 58.70 lakh, requiring approximately 1,100 MLD of treated water. According to the city’s environment department, the district is supported by five rivers, 60 lakes and ponds. The installed capacity from surface sources — Narmada, Yashwant Sagar and Bilawali — totals 594 MLD, officials added.

To offset this shortfall, the city relies on 4,945 tube wells and 1,004 hand pumps. The district environment plan also estimates 1,51,939 borewells across the district, most of them unregulated, and many drawing from compromised aquifers.

A senior IMC member also mentioned recorded cases of water loss due to “old and worn-out pipelines” leading to leakage. Inadequate ground-level enforcement, an official said, had led to mushrooming of illegal connections throughout the network.

“Unequal distribution of water infrastructure in the city has resulted in numerous direct tappings feeding different zones, creating a system where pressure is unequal and leakage endemic,” says an IMC member probing the source of contamination.

A haphazard network

Bhagirathpura, one of Indore’s oldest and most congested residential pockets, is a stark contrast to the shining Indore story. The approach roads abruptly narrow into lanes barely 10-12 feet wide. Drinking water and sewage pipelines run dangerously close to each other here.

An area engineer said most pipelines in Bhagirathpura were laid in 1993-94, under a foreign-aided project to expand the water network in slums. Bhagirathpura’s reliance on borewells continued till 1997. In the early 2000s, Narmada supply lines were installed.

“Due to a delay in providing Narmada water then, residents continued to depend on borewells. Later, the residents connected their borewells to the Narmada water line,” says a municipal official.

A senior sewage department official described the current water distribution network in Bhagirathpura as “laid haphazardly”, where “integration between existing and new systems remains incomplete”.

The water pipeline in Indore’s Bhagirathpura under scrutiny. (Special Arrangement)

Inspecting a sewage chamber, a senior engineer pointed to the water pipeline above. “It’s a chaotic design with no planning. Looking for contamination in this maze is challenging.”

Then, there were the missed warnings.

Water works department officials said the leak in Bhagirathpura was not caught in time since the area gets piped water for just an hour each day. “Those pipelines cannot sustain continuous supply, making it nearly impossible to monitor pressure drops. That is the earliest indicator of contamination,” says an official.

A local area engineer adds, “Water pressure in the pipeline did drop in Bhagirathpura’s case. The local staff should have known something was wrong immediately, but timely action was not taken.”

Red flags and tenders

But alarm bells had been ringing in Bhagirathpura for months.

Outside a house, men with tonsured heads prepared for Seema Prajapat’s last rites. Before the 50-year-old’s death due to the contamination, her son Arun Prajapat claimed that no one came to fix the pipeline despite their complaint on the Indore Mayor’s helpline about the stinking water.

He says, “They came to clean the garbage after her death. The sewage chambers fill up within days and the water still smells bad.”

The family of Seema Prajapat, one of the deceased victims, claimed they were among the first to raise an alarm on the contamination of the water pipeline. (Photo by Anand Mohan J)

Complaints regarding the poor quality of water predate the current incident. In 2025, the corporation logged 266 quality complaints. Of these, 23 formal complaints were from Zone 4, which includes Bhagirathpura.

The system to address these complaints is simple: area engineers inform sub-engineers, who lead teams to repair pipelines and send status reports to the IMC headquarters. The control room then informs the complainant about the resolution.

Assistant Engineer Yogesh Joshi, suspended in connection with the current incident, was responsible for attending these calls. He claims, “The sub-engineer did not address the complaints because no work order was issued to fix the water pipelines.”

However, the administration had started work on revamping 9.8 km of old pipelines in the area in 2022. According to IMC documents, Mayor Pushyamitra Bhargav had, through a resolution dated November 25, 2022, approved a comprehensive pipeline project for Ward No 11 of Bhagirathpura. The estimated project cost was Rs 2.38 crore, with a completion timeline of 10 months.

But the work progressed slowly.

An IMC official said the delay was under “review”. The state has informed the High Court that “80% of the work on the pipeline was completed” before the tragedy struck.

An official adds, “The old lines were supposed to be abandoned but delays in issuing work orders for the new lines meant that old ones continued to be in use. The contamination was detected in old lines.”

Councillor Kamal Baghela, whose jurisdiction includes Bhagirathpura, had made a renewed bid for another water pipeline in 2024. In a letter to Chief Minister Mohan Yadav dated December 31, 2025, Baghela alleged that the file was stalled for nearly seven months despite follow-ups. Baghela’s letter claimed the tender was issued only on July 30, 2025, after he met the Mayor. Even then, the process was not completed on time.

Even before all this, red flags had been raised on the state of Indore’s drinking water and sewage systems.

A 2018 audit of 20 water samples from the IMC water supply by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had said, “(All samples either had) …iron, nitrate, calcium, conductivity or faecal coliform more than the prescribed BIS norms, which can lead to liver, heart, pancreatic damage, diabetes, diarrhoea, vomiting, stomach pain, digestive problems, jaundice, typhoid…”

The family of Urmila Yadav, one of the deceased victims, have refused to accept the compensation. (pohoto by Anand Mohan J)

The IMC had responded that the city’s water pipelines were “very old and got damaged due to construction works of flyover, laying gas pipelines and telephones cable”.

A 2023 National Green Tribunal (NGT) committee had submitted in its report that the IMC generated “around 367.8 MLD of sewage” but failed to take into account the illicit extraction of water by nearly “910 illegal colonies”. The IMC claimed these colonies were covered by its sewerage network.

The 2024 Indore District Environment Plan, which looked at industrial waste generation, had flagged that IMC’s pipelines were “damaged and choked at many places”.

The aftermath

Two days after patients began flooding hospitals, on December 26, 2025, the IMC finally issued work orders to complete the final stages of connecting the main water pipes to households in Bhagirathpura.

But as deaths, hospitalisations and public outcry escalated, heads started to roll.

According to senior IMC and government sources, former Commissioner Yadav and former Additional Commissioner Rohit Sisonia were found to have “delayed fixing of water pipelines, keeping local tenders on hold and failing to establish a system for monitoring water leakage complaints”.

Public Health Engineering Department’s Superintendent Engineer Sanjeev Shrivastava was found to have “ignored complaints and disregarded senior officials”.

His subordinates, sub-engineer Shubham Srivastava and area engineer Yogesh Josh, were dismissed for “not repairing leakages”.

The 11 small industries churning out machine parts, textiles and construction products in Bhagirathpura are also under probe.

Meanwhile, engineers currently involved in the fixing of water pipelines have called for “long-lasting changes”.

A senior IMC official says, “Engineers are overburdened. In this case, the area engineer was overseeing multiple zones. Engineers are also asked to oversee drainage, gardens and, sometimes, even do building inspections. With such understaffing, delayed response is inevitable.”

Referring to the suspension of superintendent engineer Shrivastava, a colleague says, “He was deputed from the Narmada project. He is technically sound, but was handling multiple assignments related to the Narmada project. That kind of workload is unsustainable.”

Another engineer highlighted the erosion of technical capacity within the municipal cadre. “Engineers are routinely transferred and burdened with excessive workloads. Indore cannot be managed with barely 100-150 engineers. A city of this size needs at least 300 to 400 engineers, from chief engineers to sub-engineers. There has to be a dedicated engineering corps. Dependence on outside consultants should be reduced, even as focus should shift to constructing crucial infrastructure,” he says.