Since late December, at least 10 people have died and several have fallen ill after consuming contaminated drinking water in Indore’s Bhagirathpura area, after test reports of water samples confirmed that the tap water was a cocktail of deadly pathogens including E. coli, Salmonella and Vibrio cholerae bacteria.
The development has come as a surprise to many, as Indore has been projected as a strong performer in municipal governance, especially solid waste management, at a time when most urban local bodies across the country are struggling with basic service delivery.
However, experts said the Indore tragedy was not an isolated failure but a symptom of long-standing structural issues in India’s urban water supply model, particularly the absence of pressurized 24×7 water supply systems.
HT has reported on several incidents of piped water contamination in recent months, including in Gurgaon’s Sector 70A in December 2025, Pune’s Bavdhan, Bhusari Colony and Bhugaon areas in October and Delhi’s Janakpuri and Vasant Kunj in September, the fourth time in five months. Although not technically an urban area, around the same time as the Indore tragedy, two people died due to contaminated drinking water in Karlambakkam Colony in Tiruvallur district near Chennai, highlighting how fragile water security is even on the fringes of major cities.
Intermittent supply, dilapidated pipes
Srinivas Chari Vedala, former director of the Center of Excellence in Urban Administration and Environment at the Administrative Staff College of India, said that intermittent supply creates conditions of contamination. “When water flows only for a limited number of hours, distribution pipes remain empty for longer periods of time. That negative pressure draws contaminated groundwater or sewage through cracks in old pipes,” he said.
Contamination occurs not only within the distribution network, but also inside homes, where residents are forced to store water in containers, leading to the risk of secondary contamination. “This is a predictable result of intermittent systems rather than a rare anomaly,” he said.
Despite this being a known risk, Vedala said that although the first manual of the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organization (CPHEEO) in 1948 recommended a 24×7 pressurized supply with sufficient residual pressure to reach a height of 12-15 metres, it has not been implemented in any major Indian city.
“The purpose of that design was to reduce the risk of contamination by keeping the pipes constantly full,” said Vishwanath S, a water and sanitation expert. He said pressurized supplies remain the most effective protection against contamination, and should be complemented by pressure meters and GIS-based systems to detect leaks throughout the network.
The consequences of this design failure were already visible on the ground in Bhagirathpura. Residents had been complaining about foul-smelling and dirty water since July, long before the outbreak of the pandemic, but systemic negligence made the situation worse.
Vishwanath said that even though current AI and machine learning-based digital twin systems can detect leaks in water supply networks, they typically reduce losses from about 55% to about 27-28%. He stressed that such technologies cannot compensate for the lack of sustained pressure.
Also, he advocated simultaneous investment in sewage networks and solid waste management to eliminate health risks at the source.
But, in most Indian cities, despite the availability of technology, the application of GIS-based mapping of water supply networks and continuous leakage monitoring is unheard of. Sparse implementation is mainly limited to area-based development projects under smart cities.
AMRUT’s unfulfilled promise
Under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) 2.0, launched in 2021, the Center promotes 24×7 water supply projects and “drink from tap” initiatives covering at least one ward or district metering area (DMA) with more than 2,000 households, offering improvement incentives and additional funding up to 20%.
However, this has failed to translate into significant action on the ground, with the notable exception of Odisha, where about 10 cities have universal drinking from tap and 24×7 supply, while an odd 20 cities have 60% coverage of 24×7 drinking from tap, meaning residents can drink water directly from household taps without using any kind of purifier. Previous major schemes such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) have also failed to achieve any significant success beyond pilot wards. Much of the implementation is limited to select wards in the city, with even Indore considering a single-ward pilot project in September 2025.
Even the Cauvery Stage V, launched by the Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewage Board in 2024 to supply water to 110 newly incorporated villages in the city, did not adopt the 24×7 system. This is despite earlier initiatives showing positive results in supplying supplies to around 200,000 people in Belgaum, Gulbarga and Hubli-Dharwad in northern Karnataka.
A 2010 survey cited by the World Bank in these cities states that low-income households pay much less for better service, while higher-income households save on electricity costs because rooftop pumping is no longer required. In addition to public health benefits, the report also cites improvements in social outcomes such as increased women’s workforce participation and school attendance.
The limited impact of such models at the national level is reflected in central government surveys. In February 2024, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) said that water samples of only 46 out of 485 AMRUT cities were found to be potable during an event organized for the first ‘Drinking Survey’ awards. The comprehensive results of the survey have not been made public after the main event was cancelled.
The Center for Science and Environment’s (CSE) 2024 report on water and wastewater planning in large, dense, unplanned urban settlements like Sangam Vihar in New Delhi found that current urban water initiatives focus largely on infrastructure-centric metrics, such as the length of pipelines laid and the number of household tap connections, rather than the actual delivery of safe water.
A senior technical staff member working with MoHUA said that by not adopting decentralized water and sanitation systems, which create smaller and more manageable networks with dedicated supply, the risk of pollution remains systemic rather than episodic. “Subsequent central plans should encourage area-based or localized systems, especially in unplanned informal settlements and peripheral areas,” the official said, requesting anonymity, adding that the ministry should move from infrastructure targets to service level benchmarks as introduced by the World Bank in the early 2000s.
Lessons from Odisha
At present, there is 100% coverage under tap drinking facility in ten urban centers of Odisha, while work is underway in 14 others. However, similar initiatives in many Indian cities, which are better managed, are struggling to implement pan-city level drink from tap initiatives.
Senior IAS officer G Mathi Vathanan, who headed the state urban development department for 10 years and led the implementation of the 24×7 Drink from Tap programme, said Odisha’s starting point was not pipes or pumps, but a change in the way success was defined in service delivery.
He said India’s urban water sector is inclined towards excessive capital expenditure. He said, “We are very good at building and inaugurating new infrastructure, but very bad at running them efficiently on a daily basis. Contractors leave after commissioning, and the system collapses because the government is not focused on building the capacity of the workforce at all levels to manage it effectively.”
Instead of replacing the entire network, a shortcut often recommended by private consultants, cities in Odisha started with a detailed assessment of the existing infrastructure. Much of the network was underground, undocumented and expanded in an ad hoc manner as cities grew. “In many cases, the only people who knew where the pipes were were already retired,” Vathanen said.
The state relied on retired engineers, regional knowledge, and scanning technologies to map and evaluate network health, enabling selective rehabilitation rather than wholesale replacement. “We implemented drinks from tap at about 20-25% of the private sector estimate.”
He said that to ensure water quality, there is a need to reject the notion that 24×7 supply demands far more water. “People don’t drink more water or bathe more just because it’s flowing all day. What changes dramatically is the prevention of contamination.” However, this was dependent on volumetric metering, billing and assured collection of water charges. “If supply and quality are guaranteed, people are willing to pay.”
To build public confidence, Odisha’s model included community participation by involving women self-help groups. These women, known as Jal Sathi, handled metering, billing, grievance redressal and basic quality checks. “Him not being an outsider changed everything,” Vathanan said. Revenue collection increased from around 30% to over 90%, with women earning 5% of the revenue collected based on performance-linked incentives.
He said around 60% of operations and maintenance costs are currently met through revenue alone, a figure expected to improve with telescopic metering being considered. Low capital costs meant that funding from convergence schemes such as AMRUT, Jal Jeevan Mission, Finance Commission grants and state support was sufficient, without relying on multilateral funding.
