'Clean City' Indore Horror: Preventable Leak Becomes Mass Casualty Event

The tragedy that unfolded in Indore was not sudden; it was scripted over years in official files and ignored warnings. Internal documents accessed by NDTV show that complaints and pipeline replacement proposals in Bhagirathpura were recorded as early as 2022, but were buried in bureaucratic delay.

Yet the roots of the crisis go back even further.

As early as 2004, the Madhya Pradesh government had taken a $200 million (Rs 906.4 crore at the time) loan from the Asian Development Bank to overhaul water supply and improve quality in four major cities - Indore, Bhopal, Jabalpur, and Gwalior. The promise was universal access to safe and clean drinking water.

Fifteen years later, in 2019, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) exposed how that promise had failed. The CAG report flagged that contaminated and polluted water was being supplied in both Indore and Bhopal, that infrastructure was inadequate, leakages were rampant, monitoring was weak, and corruption had hollowed out the system.

Corrective measures were recommended, but little changed. Today, at least 11 people are dead in Indore after drinking contaminated water, and what is now being called a "tragedy" is in fact the final outcome of two decades of neglect, delayed decisions, and institutional indifference.

Indore entered the New Year carrying a stain no cleanliness ranking can wash away. In Bhagirathpura, families say taps delivered not drinking water, but disease triggering deaths, hospital wards packed with patients, and a wave of anger that now threatens to turn into a full-blown accountability crisis.

The government has attributed the outbreak to sewage mixing with drinking water through a leakage point. But the bigger story now emerging through files, timelines, and audit warnings is that Bhagirathpura's problem was not sudden, not "unfortunate," and not unforeseeable.

It was a tragedy waiting inside a system that had already been called out for leakage, poor monitoring, weak testing, and manipulated performance claims.

Investigators have reportedly traced the contamination to a breach in the main drinking water line near a public toilet beside the Bhagirathpura police outpost, an area where sewage proximity makes any pipeline damage a high-risk event. The state leadership has acknowledged "evidence of contamination due to leakage" and ordered probes, suspensions, and action. But residents' core question remains brutal and simple: if complaints were "continuous," why did decisive action begin only after bodies started arriving?

According to NDTV's review of municipal files, a tender to replace and lay pipeline work in Bhagirathpura was issued as early as July 2022, with approvals moving through the Water Works Committee and Mayor-in-Council, yet the file then "wandered" for months just to secure signatures.

The second phase, NDTV sources say, is even starker: a fresh file prepared in November 2024 did not translate into urgent execution. A tender was issued later, but the tender opening and work-start process remained stuck for months and was hurriedly cleared only after deaths began.

In July 2022, a tender was floated for a Bhagirathpura tank-area pipeline at Rs 2.4 crore. The file moved and got approved by the Mayor-in-Council in November 2022. The key signatures came in February 2023. In November 2024, a second pipeline-related file was prepared, yet urgency was still missing. A tender was issued almost nine months later in August 2025. The tender opening date was fixed as September 17, 2025, but the tenders were allegedly not opened and so the work was not started. On December 30, 2025, the file was quickly signed after deaths were reported and work began the next day immediately.

The timeline creates an uncomfortable contrast: what could not be completed for months was completed in hours once fatalities forced action. The investigative focus is now shifting from "what leaked" to "who delayed."

This is where the older CAG audit becomes impossible to ignore not because it predicted Bhagirathpura specifically, but because it documented the very system failures that make a Bhagirathpura inevitable.

The CAG had already red-flagged contaminated supply in Indore and Bhopal. The Indore deaths are being linked to specific local failures yet the larger picture was officially documented years ago.

The 2019 CAG performance audit on water supply management in Bhopal Municipal Corporation (BMC) and Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) recorded a structural gap. Madhya Pradesh's average surface water availability was 78 lpcd against the 135 lpcd norm, leaving a 57 lpcd deficit. Lpcd is litres per capita per day.

What CAG Said Then And Why It Matters Now

The CAG found differences between water received and water distributed ranging from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, citing absence of leak-detection mechanisms and inadequate metering and monitoring. In plain terms, when half of a household's water needs is "unaccounted," leaks and cross-contamination become easier to miss and harder to prove until people fall sick.

Leakage complaints were attended with delays ranging from 22 to 182 days, partly because repair tenders were invited separately case-by-case rather than through a standing rate contract, an administrative design that builds delay into emergency response.

With daily water only in a few zones, the CAG noted that in the audit period, only five zones in Bhopal and four zones in Indore received daily supply, while many areas got water on alternate days for 30-60 minutes, with pressure issues at tail ends.

The audit's most chilling section, in the context of Bhagirathpura, is water quality. The CAG recorded that between 2013 and 2018, 4,481 water samples (physical, chemical, and bacteriological) were found adverse (below BIS 10500 standards), yet it could not be ascertained from records what action municipal bodies took.

BIS 10500 means the Bureau of Indian Standards' permissible and desirable limits of various parameters in drinking water.

The CAG cited independent testing where 10 of 54 samples were adverse with turbidity and faecal coliform, implying 8.95 lakh residents (3.62 lakh in Bhopal, 5.33 lakh in Indore) were supplied contaminated water; the Public Health Department reported 5.45 lakh water-borne disease cases in that period.

In 23 of 45 test-checked overhead tanks and reservoirs, cleaning and mandatory biological testing of silt were not done. The CAG flagged lack of monitoring by engineers and supervisors.

The CAG said the Indore municipal body supplied borewell water without quality testing. In joint tests, all 20 borewell samples showed parameters beyond BIS norms (including faecal coliform in some), warning of serious health risks.

The CAG noted Rs 470 crore outstanding towards water charges in both corporations, absence of water audit, and no comprehensive MIS for monitoring outcomes, conditions that make accountability easy to escape.

Bhagirathpura is the moment the "system" is being forced to answer questions it has dodged for years. The CAG report is old, yes. But its findings describe structural weaknesses, leak detection gaps, measurement blindness, poor maintenance, and weak follow-through that map directly onto the anatomy of today's tragedy. And in Bhagirathpura, that structure didn't just fail. It killed.