Photo by Edrin Spahiu on Unsplash
The empty plastic chair on Bhatta Road tells a story that statistics cannot capture. For seventy years, Nandlal Pal greeted his mornings there by watching Indore wake up around him. This week, that chair sits vacant, a silent witness to a preventable tragedy that has exposed the reality of urban infrastructure even in India's most celebrated cities.
The Human Cost of Administrative Failure
Siddharth Pal clutches his father's photograph, grappling with a loss that feels both sudden and senseless. His father was fine until he drank tap water, the same water that flows through pipes beneath a city that has been crowned as India's cleanest seven consecutive times. The irony is devastating. What good is a clean street if the water flowing beneath it carries death?
The official death toll stands at seven, though families in Bhagirathpura insist the number is higher. Another 162 patients remain hospitalised across 27 facilities. These aren't just numbers on a government report; they represent families torn apart, futures erased, and a community's trust shattered. When Siddharth left for Omkareshwar for a single day, he asked his neighbour to check on his father. He returned to find his father dying, his blood pressure dropping, unable even to speak by morning. An ambulance was arranged for transfer to another hospital, but Nandlal Pal died before he could receive further treatment.
A Chain of Catastrophic Oversights
The probe into this outbreak has revealed not a single mistake but a number of failures that speak to deeper rot in urban governance. Indore sources its water from the Narmada River, channelling it through an 80-kilometre pipeline from Jalud in Khargone district. Somewhere along that journey, the system designed to sustain life became a vector for disease.
The lapses identified paint a damning picture. A loose joint in the main pipeline serving Bhagirathpura created an entry point for contamination. But the real horror lies in what entered through that breach, where a newly constructed toilet, built directly above the water supply line, was dumping human waste into a pit that lacked any proper septic system. Sewage mixed with drinking water at the main line itself, before distribution even began branching out to individual homes. This meant the contamination spread wider and faster than anyone initially understood.
The toilet's very existence above a critical water line raises uncomfortable questions. How was construction permitted in such nearness to essential infrastructure? Where were the municipal inspectors? Who approved plans that placed human waste disposal directly above the drinking water supply? These aren't technical mistakes; they represent a fundamental breakdown in planning, mistake, and accountability.
The Silence After the Storm
Perhaps most telling is what happened after the deaths began. Siddharth Pal notes that while media personnel helped when his father's body was being taken away, no political leader or official has visited the family. Promises of compensation have been made, but no one has come to the home where a son now sits alone, staring at his father's empty chair.
This silence is policy. It reflects an uncomfortable truth about how urban India often treats its most vulnerable citizens, where those who lack the social capital to demand accountability, who live in neighbourhoods where infrastructure is an afterthought, where a loose pipe joint can remain unfixed until it kills.
The authorities have told residents to avoid tap water, but what support has been provided? Siddharth describes the current reality as leaving tap water aside to filter before drinking, or travelling far distances to fetch water from borewells. For a city that celebrates its cleanliness awards, this is an extraordinary admission of failure.
The Paradox of Progress
Indore's seven consecutive "Cleanest City" awards now seem almost cruel in retrospect. These accolades measure visible cleanliness, where cleaned streets, managed waste collection and sanitised public spaces. They say nothing about what flows unseen through underground pipes, about whether the water emerging from kitchen taps is safe to drink, about whether toilets are properly connected to septic systems.
This tragedy forces us to reconsider what urban development actually means. Is a city truly clean if its infrastructure and the pipes carrying water and waste operate on the edge of this disaster? Can we celebrate smart cities and modern amenities while ignoring the basic requirement that drinking water should not carry sewage?
The irony deepens when we consider that this outbreak occurred in Bhagirathpura, named after Bhagiratha, the legendary king who brought the Ganga to earth. Here, in a neighbourhood bearing the name of someone who struggled to bring clean water to his people, residents are now afraid to drink from their taps.
Lessons in Loss
Standing beside his father's empty chair, Siddharth Pal captures the essence of this tragedy: "I don't know what I will do with the money. He will never come back to sit on that chair again." Compensation cannot restore a life. It cannot fill that chair or bring back morning conversations with neighbours. It cannot give Siddharth back the household of two that defined his world.
This statement should haunt every urban planner, every municipal official, every politician who cuts ribbons at infrastructure inaugurations. Development that doesn't ensure the safety of the most basic human necessities isn't development at all, it's a facade that collapses the moment you turn on a tap.
A Call for Accountability
The Indore water tragedy demands more than investigations and suspensions. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how we evaluate urban success. Clean streets matter, but so do clean pipes. Visible infrastructure deserves investment, but invisible infrastructure and the water remain, sewage systems, and underground networks that sustain daily life demands equal care.
Every city in India should be asking about could this happen here? How many loose joints exist in our water systems? How many informal constructions sit atop critical pipelines? How would we detect contamination before it spreads? Who is responsible for ensuring that awards for cleanliness reflect genuine public health security?
Nandlal Pal's empty chair is not just a family's loss, it's an indication of priorities that celebrate appearance over substance, that value awards over lives, that allow basic infrastructure to deteriorate until the cost is measured in coffins rather than currency. Until we learn that lesson, that chair will remain a symbol not just of one man's death but of countless preventable tragedies waiting to unfold in cities across India.
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