Indore water tragedy death toll concealed as state reports 8 but 18 families compensated

For the first time since a spate of deaths linked to contaminated water rocked Madhya Pradesh’s Indore district, government records have laid bare the true scale of the tragedy. Official documents show that the Indore district administration has paid compensation to the families of 18 deceased persons, even as the state informed the Madhya Pradesh High Court just a day earlier that only eight deaths had occurred.

The deaths were reported between December 24, 2025, and January 6, 2026, after residents of Bhagirathpura allegedly consumed contaminated groundwater. While authorities initially blamed a public toilet operating without a mandatory septic tank, investigations have since widened to examine whether local borewell connections caused faecal contamination of the water supply.

According to government records, cheques of ₹2 lakh each have already been distributed to 18 families. One additional family is still awaiting payment, with officials assisting them in completing bank formalities.

The discrepancy came into sharp focus when a Division Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court—comprising Justice Vijay Kumar Shukla and Justice Alok Awasthi—pulled up the state on Tuesday for its handling of the case. Expressing strong displeasure, the court observed that the government’s response was “insensitive” and said the incident had brought “a bad name to Indore, one of the cleanest cities of the country,” turning it into a matter of national and international concern.

The court’s remarks followed the state’s submission that a medical board was still verifying the death count and that the process was complicated by natural deaths and the absence of post-mortem reports. The government reiterated before the court that eight deaths had been confirmed.

Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, however, sought to downplay the numbers on January 7, saying the focus should not be on statistics. “The loss of even a single life is extremely painful for us. Therefore, we don’t delve into statistics,” he said, adding that officially validated figures typically include only cases where post-mortems were conducted.

A senior government official explained the contradiction, stating that several families chose not to conduct post-mortems. “The local administration, including senior leaders such as Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya, decided to provide cheques in all reported cases of death without waiting for the final audit,” the official said. A formal death audit, he added, is still underway to ascertain the exact toll.

Meanwhile, laboratory findings have confirmed severe contamination of groundwater in Bhagirathpura. A 50-page bacterial test report prepared by the Indore Municipal Corporation’s Water Testing Laboratory in Musakhedi found faecal contamination in 35 of 51 water samples collected from local borewells.

The test, dated January 3, 2026, revealed faecal coliform counts ranging from 13 to 360 per millilitre, against the Indian safety standard of zero. “The contamination level found in Bhagirathpura is far beyond what is considered safe,” a senior municipal official said.

Following the findings, the administration launched chlorination drives across more than 500 borewells and began geo-tagging water sources to improve monitoring and prevent future contamination.

What remains unresolved, however, is the growing gap between the state’s official narrative and its own records—an inconsistency now squarely under judicial scrutiny.