For a country that considers tall buildings with glass frontages, a few wide roads and claims of city governance as “development,” the wake-up call comes from two premier cities: Madhya Pradesh’s second-largest urban space, Indore, and Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital. Indore has declared an epidemic of water-borne disease in one part, Bhagirath, and Gandhinagar has reported a high number of typhoid cases, also due to contaminated drinking water supply, in some sectors.
These are the premier cities of their respective states. Indore is Madhya Pradesh’s largest city, winner of the “clean city award” for the eighth consecutive year. Gandhinagar is where Prime Minister Narendra Modi ran the state for a dozen years as Chief Minister. His management of the state was seen as the Gujarat Model, amplified by the media. It is the constituency of the country’s second-most powerful man, Amit Shah. Gandhinagar is India’s third greenfield city.
There is an irony here. Indore’s epidemic was declared after a meeting in the “Smart City Office.” The cleanest city had to call in experts from the Centre and several institutions to identify the root cause of the wave of sicknesses that took hold of one locality. It had to suspend the piped drinking water supply and send in water tankers, opt for “super chlorination” and distribute medication door to door.
Media reports from Gandhinagar convey that “newly laid water supply pipelines” for Rs 257 crore had sprung a leak in at least seven places, and the Times of India quoted an unnamed official of the Roads and Buildings (R&B) Department saying that when “high pressure water began flowing, weak pipes developed leaks” and mixed with the sewage line. Such contamination leads to faecal coliform (e-coli) and serious public health issues.
What does ‘development’ mean?
“Development” is not to be measured in fiscal investments alone but by the delivery of quality public goods and services. Mumbai – now in the process of election to its municipal corporation – has shown that year upon year, the monsoons excavate its roads and public outrage has not led to any improvement in this area. In the past few years, there were no elected corporators to blame on politicians. There were contractors and officials, because, like 29 other cities, commissioners were running the show.
Each city in the country would have its own tale of woe with respect to many services that are rendered to its citizens. Provision of clean drinking water is a constitutional right emanating from the Right to Life, in that the environment – read water here – should not be polluted at its source. But there are cities where untreated drains are allowed to flow into major water sources, garbage is allowed to pile up, footpaths are either not laid or, if provided, derelict or used for purposes other than the intended.
Each Indian city or town has a legacy of poor services in almost every sector because the citizen is not its priority but politics and politicians with their focus on themselves are. However, compared to the smaller towns, which in Hindi or Urdu are known as kasba – are worse off. They barely compare favourably with respect to the rural areas. During droughts, they are served by tankers with never a mention of the source of the water; people are never told where it is fetched. Private tanker owners in cities bring it from just anywhere because, by description, it is water.
Water purifiers are a universal feature in urban households, which has led to a US$ 3 billion market and is growing, due to citizens’ health concerns arising from likely water contamination. Almost all buyers of the product are households that do not – and with good reason – trust the municipal water supply. Overseas, you can drink straight from the tap. In Switzerland, I was told it was safe to take a glassful from Lake Lucerne and drink it.
Water treated with the reverse osmosis process (RO) leads to the waste of about two-thirds of the municipal water, making it unusable for other non-potable purposes. No home has that system of optimising water. No city in India has surplus water to waste, and drinking water is not supplied equitably. A Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report on urban local bodies in Madhya Pradesh, host to Indore, had revealed that seven cities did not even have water testing labs.
