BHOPAL: Official audits had warned for years that contaminated drinking water posed serious public health risks in Madhya Pradesh, after 5.45 lakh cases of water-borne diseases were recorded in Bhopal and Indore civic areas between 2013 and 2018 – long before the Indore tragedy claimed at least 10 lives and triggered public outrage.These alerts were part of a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on General and Social Sectors for the year ended March 31, 2018. The report flagged systemic lapses in monitoring and testing of drinking water by urban local bodies while putting out the tally of 5.45 lakh diseases in the two cities.The report cautioned that “the possibility of contaminated water being supplied by the MCs (municipal corporations) during the period could not be ruled out”. Such CAG reports are part of its assessments of the civic bodies’ finances.To assess ground realities, CAG’s audit conducted joint sampling in Aug-Sept 2018 with officials of Bhopal Municipal Corporation (BMC) and Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC). A total of 54 samples were collected from water sources, filter plants, overhead tanks and consumer taps, and independently tested at the State Research Laboratory, Bhopal. In BMC areas, turbidity in some samples exceeded BIS norms, while faecal coliform, which should be 0, was detected in multiple samples. In Indore, faecal coliform counts ranged from 40 to 140, far above permissible limits.The auditor noted that 8.95 lakh residents — 3.62 lakh in Bhopal and 5.33 lakh in Indore — were likely to be affected due to the supply of contaminated water containing faecal coliform, pointing to a “lack of monitoring of filter plants at the operational level as well as at the distribution level”.CAG raised concerns again in the audit report on local bodies for the year ended March 31, 2022, which found that seven of the 14 urban local bodies randomly audited did not have water testing laboratories.CAG observed that tests were not conducted regularly and that civic bodies failed to follow minimum sampling frequencies prescribed in the CPHEEO manual, warning that “adverse effects on the health of the population due to supply of water without regular testing cannot be ruled out”. CPHEEO is short for Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation, a technical wing of the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs.After the recent Indore deaths, NGO Jan Swastha Abhiyan has written to the MP chief secretary and the Union Jal Shakti ministry, citing the repeated audit findings, demanding urgent action and stressing that warnings sounded years ago were never translated into sustained corrective measures.
