Across India, patchy supply raises risk of contamination in water line
The Indore tragedy is not a one-off, but a sign of structural issues, among which lack of 24x7 supply is a key concern
Since late December, at least 10 people have died and many have fallen ill from consuming contaminated drinking water in Indore’s Bhagirathpura area, following which test reports of the water samples confirmed the tap water was a cocktail of deadly pathogens, including E coli, Salmonella and Vibrio cholerae bacteria among others.
The incident has surprised many, given Indore has been projected as a as a strong performer in municipal administration, especially in solid waste management, at a time when most urban local bodies across the country struggle with basic service delivery.
However, experts said the Indore tragedy is not an isolated malfunction, but a symptom of longstanding structural issues in India’s urban water supply models, particularly the absence of pressurised 24x7 water supply systems.
HT has reported several incidents of piped water contamination in recent months, including Sector 70A of Gurgaon in December 2025, Pune’s Bavdhan, Bhusari Colony and Bhugaon areas in October, and Delhi’s Janakpuri and Vasant Kunj in September, the former for the fourth time in five months. While not technically urban, almost at the same time as the Indore tragedy, two people died in Karlambakkam Colony in Tiruvallur district near Chennai due to contaminated drinking water, highlighting how fragile water safety remains even on the fringes of major cities.
Intermittent supply, worn-out pipes
Srinivas Chary Vedala, former director at the Centre of Excellence in urban governance and environment at the Administrative Staff College of India, explained that intermittent supply creates the conditions for contamination. “When water flows only for limited hours, distribution pipes run empty for long stretches. That negative pressure draws in 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 that are prone to secondary contamination. “This is a predictable outcome of intermittent systems, rather than a rare anomaly,” he added.
Despite this being a known risk, Vedala said that although the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO)’s first manual in 1948 recommended 24×7 pressurised supply with residual pressure sufficient to reach 12–15 metre heights, it has not been realised in any major Indian city.
“That design was meant precisely to reduce contamination risks by keeping pipes continuously full,” noted Vishwanath S, a water and sanitation expert. He added that pressurised supply remains the most effective safeguard against contamination, and should be complemented by pressure meters and GIS-based systems to detect leaks across the network.
The consequences of this design failure were already visible on the ground in Bhagirathpura. Residents had complained about foul-smelling and dirty water since July, much before the outbreak, but systemic inattention allowed conditions to worsen.
Vishwanath said that even though current AI and machine learning-based digital twin systems can detect leakages in water supply networks, they typically hit a ceiling after reducing losses from around 55% to about 27-28%. He stressed that such technologies cannot compensate for the absence of continuous pressurisation.
At the same time, he advocated for simultaneous investments in sewage networks and solid waste management to eliminate health risks at the source.
But, in most Indian cities, the application of GIS-based mapping of water supply networks and continuous leakage monitoring remains unheard of, despite the availability of technology. The sparse implementation is mainly limited to area-based development projects under Smart City.
AMRUT’s unfulfilled promise
Under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) 2.0 launched in 2021, the Centre promotes 24x7 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 reform incentives and up to 20% extra funding.
However, this has failed to translate into significant action on the ground, barring the notable exception of Odisha where around 10 cities have universal drink from tap and 24x7 supply while 20 odd cities have 60% coverage of 24x7 drink from tap coverage, meaning residents can drink water straight from the household tap without using any form of purifiers. Previous flagship schemes such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) have also failed to achieve any significant success beyond pilot wards. Mostly implementation has been limited to select wards of the city with even Indore considering a single-ward pilot in September 2025.
Even Cauvery Stage V, introduced by the Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewage Board in 2024 to supply water to 110 newly included villages in the city, did not adopt a 24x7 system. This is despite an earlier initiative to supply around 200,000 people across Belgaum, Gulbarga, and Hubli-Dharwad in north Karnataka having shown positive outcomes.
A 2010 survey quoted by the World Bank from these cities said that lower-income households paid much less for a far better service, while higher-income households saved on electricity costs as rooftop pumping was no longer required. The report also cited improvements in social outcomes such as increased women’s workforce participation and school attendance, in addition to public health gains.
The limited impact of such models nationally is reflected in the Union government’s surveys. In February 2024, the ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) said that water samples from only 46 of the 485 AMRUT cities were found to be potable during a curtain raiser event for the first ‘Peyjal Survekshan’ awards. The broader results of the survey have not been made public after the main event was cancelled.
A 2024 report by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) 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 embracing decentralised water and sanitation systems that create smaller and more manageable networks with dedicated supply, the risk of contamination remains systemic rather than episodic. “Subsequent central schemes should incentivise area-based or localised systems, particularly in unplanned informal settlements and peripheral areas,” the official said on 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
Currently, ten of Odisha’s urban centres have 100% coverage under the drink from tap facility, with work 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’s urban development department for 10 years and led the implementation of the 24x7 Drink from Tap programme, said Odisha’s starting point was not pipes or pumps, but a shift in how success in service delivery was defined.
He said India’s urban water sector is overly skewed towards capital expenditure. “We are very good at creating new infrastructures and inaugurating them, but very poor at running them efficiently on a day-to-day basis. Contractors leave after commissioning, and the system collapses because the government’s focus is not on building the capacity of the work force at all levels to manage it effectively,” he added.
Instead of replacing entire networks, a shortcut often recommended by private consultants, Odisha’s cities began with a detailed assessment of 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 had already retired,” Vathanan said.
The state relied on retired engineers, field knowledge, and scanning technologies to map and assess network health, enabling selective rehabilitation rather than wholesale replacement. “We implemented drink from tap at about 20-25% of what the private sector estimated.”
Ensuring water quality, he said, required rejecting the assumption that 24x7 supply demands far more water. “People don’t drink more water or bathe more just because it flows all day. What changes dramatically is prevention of contamination.” This, however, depended on volumetric metering, billing, and assured collection of water charges. “If supply and quality is guaranteed, people are willing to pay.”
To build public confidence, Odisha’s model involved community partnership by engaging women’s self-help groups. These women, known as Jala Sathis, handled metering, billing, grievance redressal, and basic quality checks. “Them not being outsiders changed everything,” Vathanan said. Revenue collection rose from about 30% to over 90%, with the women earning 5% of the revenue collected on performance-linked incentives basis.
He said approximately 60% of operations and maintenance costs are currently met through revenue alone, with the figure expected to improve as telescopic metering was contemplated. The reduced capital costs meant that funding from converging schemes such as AMRUT, the Jal Jeevan Mission, Finance Commission grants, and state support was sufficient, without relying on multilateral funding.