It’s a crying shame that at least 10 people including an infant have died from imbibing contaminated municipal water in India’s ‘cleanest city’. The mayor of Indore has admitted that human excreta leaching into the main water pipeline in the city’s Bhagirathpura area caused an outbreak of diarrhoea that affected more than 1,400 residents.
The matter jumped to national prominence on Wednesday, when the Madhya Pradesh High Court directed the city corporation to ensure clean water supplies. But residents from the affected area have been calling the mayor’s helpline with complaints of contaminated, foul-smelling water from as far back as October. And this happened in a city adjudged the cleanest in India by the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs for eight consecutive years.
If not for protecting its pride, one would have expected institutional memory in Madhya Pradesh to trigger greater urgency in dealing with deadly contamination.
Exactly a month ago, the state sombrely commemorated the country’s worst industrial disaster. The leakage of deadly chemicals from Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant on December 3, 1984 killed thousands overnight and several more thousands over the following years as a result of exposure.
An analysis of groundwater samples from near the plant a quarter century later revealed the presence of toxic materials several times higher than the safe limits. Yet, civic groups have had to wage legal battles for decades to clean up toxic waste from the site—an action that started as late as last January.
Indore had worked hard on waste management, road cleaning and construction of public toilets to earn its tag of a clean city. But administrative apathy and criminal negligence can destroy a carefully-built reputation in days.
In 2019, the auditor general had flagged serious deficiencies in water management in Bhopal and Indore, including the observation that it usually took the municipalities 22-108 days to control a leakage. It’s not only about Indore—studies show that like the air above, the aquifers under many of our cities are prone to other kinds of deadly contamination, too.
Excessive arsenic, fluoride and uranium in hundreds of districts continue to impose a silent toll that goes unaddressed. It’s time we urgently demanded safe and ample supply of the most basic substance that makes life on the planet possible.