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Sunil Sahu waited ten years for a son. After their daughter was born, his family prayed and hoped, and when the baby boy finally arrived, it felt like a miracle. At five months old, that little boy meant everything to them. With every laugh, every little noise, he just lit up their world.

Then, on December 26, 2025, the baby got sick with diarrhoea. Sunil and his wife did what any worried parents would do. They filtered the city water, mixed up his formula, and rushed him to the doctor. The medicine seemed to help, and for a few days, he looked like he was getting better.

But then December 29 hit. Out of nowhere, his fever shot up. He started vomiting violently. Just hours later, their baby was gone.

Sunil could barely speak when reporters showed up. “We never imagined the water we give our children every day could kill him,” he said, his voice cracking. Turns out, the water running through their taps in Bhagirathpura, Indore, so-called India’s “cleanest city”, was tainted with raw sewage. Their son wasn’t the only child lost. The whole community was shaken.

The Crisis No One Wanted to Believe

Between December 25 and December 31, 2025, something awful hit Bhagirathpura, a packed, working-class neighbourhood in the heart of Madhya Pradesh’s commercial hub. People started noticing their tap water looked different, cloudy, stinking, with a nasty metallic bite. A lot of folks blamed it on too much chlorine. Some tried boiling it. Others, trusting a city that had racked up “cleanest city” awards eight years straight, just drank it.

Then, within two days, the whole neighbourhood got slammed. Families fell violently ill. Everyone shared the same symptoms: severe vomiting, nonstop diarrhoea, and dehydration that left people barely able to stand. Older residents collapsed right at home. Arun Prajapat, who worked in construction, got a panicked call from his mother on December 28. She said the water smelled weird. By the next morning, she was gone; two rounds of vomiting and diarrhoea were all it took. She never even made it to a hospital.

The health department said 2,456 people across the city got sick, and more than 270 ended up in the hospital. But those numbers barely scratched the surface. People in Bhagirathpura said way more died than the government admitted. Officials confirmed maybe six to ten dead at first, but locals insisted it was at least 23, including the five-month-old boy and multiple elderly women. A later audit tied at least 15 of 21 deaths in the area directly to the poisoned water.

A Toilet Built on a Lifeline

Hospitals were crowded with people struggling to breathe, desperate for water. Families burned through their savings just to get emergency care. Meanwhile, officials from the Indore Municipal Corporation rushed around, trying to figure out what was making everyone so sick. What they found was almost unbelievable.

A main drinking water pipeline serving thousands of homes developed a leak right under a public toilet at a police check post in Bhagirathpura. But it gets worse. The toilet didn’t even have a basic septic tank or any safety system. Raw sewage just drained into an open pit. So, when the old, 30-year-old water pipe underneath cracked, all that waste flowed straight into the drinking water.

IMC Commissioner Dilip Kumar Yadav didn’t sugarcoat it. “We found there was no safety tank under the toilet,” he said. Lab tests backed up what people in Bhagirathpura already feared. About one in three water samples had bacteria linked to sewage and human waste. Scientists were pretty sure dangerous pathogens, like the ones that cause cholera, were in the mix.

So, for days or maybe even weeks, every time someone in the neighbourhood poured a glass of water, cooked dinner, or took a bath, they were using water contaminated with sewage. People were drinking, cooking, and washing with toilet waste.

Fifteen Months of Inaction

The real gut punch wasn’t just the contamination; it was realising how easily the whole thing could’ve been avoided. Turns out, officials had already floated a tender for a new water supply line in Bhagirathpura way back in August 2024. That’s more than 15 months before disaster struck. The money was supposed to come from AMRUT, the central government’s big urban upgrade push.

But nothing happened. The tender just sat there, collecting dust. Officials blamed delays in getting the funds, and the old pipeline kept decaying, hidden under crumbling roads and patchy toilets in a neighbourhood thrown together without much planning. Actual work didn’t kick off until December 30, 2025 by then, people had already started dying, and the only reason anything moved was that the public got angry enough to force their hand.

This wasn’t a one-off mistake. Back in 2018, the Comptroller and Auditor General took a hard look at Indore’s water management and didn’t pull any punches. The audit showed that around 65 per cent of the city’s treated water leaked out or was wasted, so nearly two-thirds of clean water never made it to homes. They found 2,873 leakage cases in Indore, and fixing them took anywhere from three weeks to six months.

Even after spending ₹589 crore (about $70 million) on sewage management between 2008 and 2022, Bhagirathpura still didn’t have a proper sewer system or new water pipelines by 2025. The Indore Smart City website all but admitted it, pipes thrown down with no real plan, and operational zones that didn’t make sense.

Rules Written in Water, Broken in Practice

India doesn’t lack rules when it comes to water safety. The Manual on Water Supply and Treatment, put out by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO), spells it out: keep water supply lines above sewerage lines, with enough distance between them. The Manual on Sewerage and Sewage Treatment Systems says something similar: always run sewers below water lines, with clear minimum gaps. IS Code 1742:1983 lays it all out in numbers: at least 0.3 meters of vertical space and 3 meters horizontal separation.

But in Bhagirathpura, those standards were just words on paper. Years of wild, unplanned building turned the ground beneath the neighbourhood into a tangled mess of pipes going every which way, ignoring every rule. The toilet built right on top of a drinking water main wasn’t some one-off mistake; it was just the most obvious sign of a pattern that had become routine.

The Price of a Glass of Water

For people in Bhagirathpura, this wasn’t just about a health crisis. It wrecked them financially. Families spent anywhere from ₹10,000 to ₹40,000 on doctors and medicine. That’s months of income for folks who work construction, sell snacks, or take up whatever work they can find.

Kishore Dhruvkar’s mother, Geeta Bai, died because of this. She trusted the system and insisted on drinking only water from the Narmada River, believing it was pure. That trust cost her life. She fell sick with stomach pain, vomiting, and severe dehydration. By the time her family tried to get her help, it was too late.

Two women in the area miscarried after drinking the contaminated water. Anganwadi workers, local health volunteers, walked dozens of people to crowded hospitals because ambulances couldn’t keep up. Government teams surveyed nearly 8,000 homes and checked on almost 40,000 people. Out of 2,456 suspected cases, 212 landed in the hospital to start with. At the worst point, 162 people were still in hospital beds, 26 of them fighting for their lives in intensive care.

People say around 3,000 residents got sick from the water. About 450 ended up in the hospital. These aren’t just numbers. These are neighbours, friends, kids, people who did nothing wrong except believe that their drinking water was safe.

When Ministers Snap and Courts Intervene

The way politicians handled the crisis said just as much about their failures as the contamination itself. On December 31, while hospitals kept filling up with seriously ill people, a reporter cornered Madhya Pradesh Cabinet Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya with a simple question: Who’s responsible here? Vijayvargiya, who’s also the local MLA for Indore-1, completely lost his cool.

“Oh, leave it, don't ask useless questions,” he snapped. When the reporter pushed him about families struggling to pay hospital bills, Vijayvargiya got even harsher, using language that really crossed a line. Cameras caught the whole thing, and the clip went viral. Suddenly, his attitude became a symbol of how out of touch officials seemed. Later, Vijayvargiya posted a public apology on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), saying he was tired and upset. But honestly, the damage was done.

People got angrier by the hour, and then the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Indore Bench jumped in, fast. On December 31, 2025, a vacation bench with Justice Rajesh Kumar Gupta and Justice B.P. Sharma opened a case on its own under Article 21 of the Constitution, which says everyone has the right to clean drinking water as part of the right to life.

The court didn’t pull any punches. They ordered free medical care for everyone affected, clean water for Bhagirathpura right away, and demanded a detailed report by January 2, 2026. During the hearings, judges didn’t hide their frustration. They called out private hospitals for turning away dying patients who couldn’t pay upfront.

Ritesh Inani, President of the Indore High Court Bar Association, he filed one of three PILs about the crisis. He spoke to reporters: “We’ve also asked the court to set up a probe committee led by a retired High Court judge so this doesn’t happen again.” When the state’s first report claimed just four people had died, the High Court pushed back hard, pointing to the obvious gaps between official numbers and what people saw on the ground. They demanded a proper investigation.

Sacrificial Lambs and System Failures

Right after the incident, people zeroed in on three officials. Shubham Shrivastava, the sub-engineer in charge at the Public Health Engineering Department, got fired on the spot. Zonal Officer Shaligram Sitole and Assistant Engineer Yogesh Joshi didn’t get off easy either; they were suspended and now face an inquiry.

Chief Minister Mohan Yadav hurried to the hospitals, met with patients, and promised ₹2 lakh (about $2,400) as compensation for the families who lost someone. He also announced free treatment for everyone affected. Then the government set up a three-member committee to investigate. Navjeevan Panwar, an IAS officer, would lead, joined by superintendent engineer Pradeep Nigam and associate professor Shailesh Rai from Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College.

But for a lot of locals and activists, these moves rang hollow. Sure, they punished some engineers on the ground, but nobody tackled the bigger mess, the system that let someone build a toilet without a septic tank right on top of a water main. Senior advocate Ajay Bagadiya, who’s handling one of the PILs in the High Court, didn’t hold back. He accused the government of sending fresh IAS officers to Indore just so they could treat the city like a cash cow and move on once they got what they wanted.

Meanwhile, the Opposition Congress party set up its own fact-finding committee. Rahul Gandhi showed up, too, meeting families hit by the disaster. The political show played out as expected. Still, underneath all the speeches and promises, tough questions remain. How did India’s “cleanest city” end up with drinking water this dangerous? Who actually signed off on building a toilet right over a major pipeline? And why did a tender to replace that pipeline sit ignored for 15 months while people kept using tainted water?

The Paradox That Won't Go Away

Indore’s tragedy rips the mask off India’s urban success stories. Here’s a city that wins awards for being spotless, streets swept, trash sorted, the whole nine yards. People point to Indore and say, “Look how clean!” But while everyone was admiring the surface, no one paid attention to what really matters: clean, safe water. Those shiny Swachh Survekshan trophies? They didn’t see the old, leaking pipes running under the city, mixing sewage with the water people drink.

Dr Sachin Tiwale from ATREE put it bluntly: in cities where water comes and goes, even tiny cracks in the system turn into disaster zones. When the supply shuts off and pipes suck in air, they also pull in whatever filth is around. Fancy gadgets and ambitious campaigns can’t fix this. Only real, ongoing oversight can keep water safe.

As Indore tried to heal, families mourning, patients limping home broke after hospital stays, nobody could escape the real questions. Will the promised investigations actually change anything? Or will they just blame a few low-level staff and call it a day? Will neighbourhoods like Bhagirathpura finally get the basic upgrades they’ve needed for years?

For people like Sunil Sahu, none of these questions really matter anymore. He buried his infant son, his only child, after a decade of hope, because someone thought it was fine to build a toilet right on top of a water pipeline, no septic tank, no safety measures. In the city everyone calls “the cleanest in India,” a simple drink of water turned deadly.

Until leaders start caring as much about the hidden problems as they do about public image, Indore’s ugly truth isn’t going anywhere. And the next tragedy is just waiting to happen.

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