For the past four months, the residents of Bhagirathpura, a densely populated area lying cheek-by-jowl with an industrial area in Indore, had been getting foul-smelling water. They complained to the municipality — to no avail.

It took 10 deaths (14 according to locals) for the authorities to wake up and ‘discover’ that sewage from a public toilet was seeping into the water-supply pipes. Reports now suggest that the file inviting bids to replace the pipes in the area was stuck at the same table in the Indore municipal corporation office for exactly the same period of four months.

Between 3 and 7 January, over 40,000 people were tested; 2,456 of them were found to have picked up infections. More than 162 people had to be hospitalised; 26 people were so severely ill they had to be admitted to intensive care units. This, in a city that has been declared the ‘cleanest’ in the country eight times since 2016.

Indore has another ‘feather in its cap’ — eight elected legislators to the Assembly are from the BJP which controls the municipal corporation and occupies the mayoral seat. Not only is the BJP in power in the state and at the Centre, chief minister Mohan Yadav is in charge of Indore and the state’s urban development minister Kailash Vijayvargiya represents a constituency in the city.

None of this helped the people who died. The victims included Sadhna and Sunil Sahu’s six-month-old son Avyan. This child, born to the couple after 10 years, was among the first victims of the Indore water contamination crisis. He had been fed milk diluted with water from the municipal tap; on........

© National Herald