Secure water: Want to repair accountability
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India has learnt to quantify its environmental crises. Air air pollution is tracked meticulously via the Air High quality Index; heatwaves and floods dominate each day public discourse. But, when ingesting water turns lethal, the response stays dangerously delayed, localised, and short-lived.
The latest tragedy in Bhagirathpura, Indore, the place contaminated water led to a number of deaths and widespread sickness, just isn’t an aberration. It’s a symptom of a deeper governance failure. What occurred in Indore mirrors incidents throughout the political and geographical map.
In Gujarat’s Mahisagar district, a latest jaundice outbreak was linked to contamination of borewell and municipal sources. In Tiruvallur, Tamil Nadu, residents had been hospitalised after consuming polluted provide water. These episodes, echoing the devastation of the 2014 hepatitis outbreak in Sambhalpur, Odisha, underline a stark actuality: unsafe ingesting water just isn’t a localised lapse, however a recurring nationwide emergency.
The size of this disaster is staggering. Between 2005 and 2022, India reported over 20.98 crore instances of main water-borne illnesses — together with Acute Diarrhoeal Illness, Typhoid, Viral Hepatitis, and Cholera—resulting in greater than 50,000 deaths. Nonetheless, these figures signify solely the tip of the iceberg.
In line with NITI Aayog’s Composite Water Administration Index, almost 200,000 folks die yearly in India because of insufficient entry to protected water. Regardless of these harrowing numbers, water high quality hardly ever generates the identical political urgency as different environmental markers. India continues to rank close to the underside of the worldwide Water High quality Index — putting a hundred and twentieth out of 122 nations — with an estimated 70 per cent of its water sources contaminated.
The financial value
Whereas the human value is seen in hospital wards, the financial value stays poorly acknowledged. Sickness brought on by contaminated provide triggers a cycle of misplaced workdays, rising medical expenditure, and diminished labour productiveness affecting 37.7 million folks and ensuing right into a lack of roughly 73 million working days yearly, per Ministry of Water Provide and Sanitation.
The basis trigger of those outbreaks is never the water supply itself, however the journey it takes to the faucet. In Bhagirathpura, as in lots of Indian cities, stories level to sewage mixing with ingesting water strains — a well-known city failure reflecting the siloed execution of infrastructure. Municipal departments typically function in isolation. Highway development companies routinely excavate with out coordinating with water and sewerage boards. Within the absence of correct, shared maps of underground utilities, heavy equipment cracks ingesting water pipes and ruptures adjoining sewer strains.
Throughout strain drops, sewage is drawn into water mains, contaminating the provision lengthy earlier than the issue turns into seen.
This failure of coordination is compounded by the best way city infrastructure programmes are executed. The second section of the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and City Transformation (AMRUT 2.0) goals to make cities “water safe,” but its implementation stays skewed towards asset creation. New pipelines are laid with out adequately fixing the governance of ageing, leaking networks beneath them. India has constructed a lot of the {hardware} of urbanisation with out embedding the “software program” of security protocols, steady monitoring, and institutional accountability.
Municipal our bodies operate because the supplier, the tester, and the choose of their very own efficiency. This implies the potential polluter and the regulator are sometimes the identical entity. With out an unbiased regulator empowered to mandate requirements and penalise failures, testing knowledge is never made public, and contamination is acknowledged solely after an outbreak produces casualties. Governance thus stays reactive — patching pipes after a tragedy quite than stopping the breach.
Addressing this disaster calls for a transfer from emergency fixes to preventive governance. This requires higher utility mapping, unbiased water regulation to separate suppliers from auditors, and a shift in AMRUT 2.0 from “protection targets” to “water security on the faucet”. India has learnt to measure the air it breathes. It should now present the identical seriousness in safeguarding the water it drinks — not as a welfare afterthought, however as a Constitutional obligation and a foundational financial necessity.
The author is Vice-Chairman, All India Congress Committee (Minority Division)
Printed on January 3, 2026
