A judicial commission looking into the Bhagirathpura contamination has pinned lapses on a long-serving executive engineer while flagging decades of missing pipeline documentation.
The judicial commission probing the Bhagirathpura water contamination case in Indore has come back with two uncomfortable findings. One, a senior engineer sat on known risks for years. Two, nobody can produce the paperwork that might explain how the city's old pipe network was actually built.
Executive engineer Sanjeev Kumar Srivastava, who worked in the water supply department from 2013 to 2026, has been named responsible for what the commission calls serious lapses. According to the inquiry, he did not ensure proper inspection of a pipeline network the commission describes as sensitive, did not get damaged pipelines replaced in time, and did not keep adequate watch on the system. That's a long tenure to carry that kind of finding.
But the bigger headache for Indore's civic machinery might be the second part of the report. The commission says original maps, alignment plans, engineering designs, work orders, measurement books, inspection records and completion certificates for the city's old sewer and water lines simply could not be produced.
The sewer network in question was laid between 1990 and 1995. The water supply lines went down between 1999 and 2004. That's roughly three decades of infrastructure sitting underground with no paper trail to show how it was built, who signed off on it, or what quality checks happened along the way.
Without that documentation, the commission says it's tough to pin down exactly where the original construction went wrong, whether contractors cut corners, and who should have been maintaining the system since. It's one thing to say a network is old. It's another to have no way of checking what state it was actually built to begin with.
So the commission has recommended a fresh, separate inquiry, this one focused entirely on how the records vanished and who was supposed to be safeguarding them. That's a second investigation stacked on top of the first, and it raises an obvious question for Indore Municipal Corporation: if records this basic can go missing for a network serving lakhs of residents, what else is unaccounted for?
The original contamination incident in Bhagirathpura is what triggered the judicial inquiry in the first place, and this report is being treated as a first phase of findings rather than a final word. Action against Srivastava, if any, has not been detailed in the commission's current report. Neither has a timeline for the follow-up inquiry into the missing records.
For residents of the area, the immediate questions are simpler and more pressing. Has the contaminated supply been fixed. Is it safe to drink now. And will the accountability trail, once the second inquiry starts digging, actually go anywhere.
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