10 dead as sewage mixes with drinking tap water in India

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/02/sewage-in-drinking-water-deaths-india-cleanest-city-indore

47 Comments

  1. > ranked India’s “cleanest city” for the last eight years.

    Indian redditors, this is true ?

  2. Horror_Response_1991 on

    After what happened in Flint, Michigan I don’t drink tap water.  On the rare occasions I do it has to go through a filter.

  3. When I was in India, I was told to only drink bottled water and to also make sure that the bottle was sealed and unopened (to make sure that it wasn’t filled with tap water). I can imagine it probably isn’t affordable or realistic for the average Indian citizen to be only drinking bottled water. Plus, think of all the plastic waste.

  4. RidetheSchlange on

    FYI: one of the reasons India’s tap water is not drinkable without significant filtration is because they don’t fix their aging water supply systems, even in good areas. The pipes are cracked and otherwise porous at this point, plus sewage is everywhere and poorly separated underground, so those pipes leak and then contaminate freshwater lines and not to mention, most open water supplies are contaminated anyhow. Then comes the contamination of rivers, streams, springs, and so on. It’s simply people don’t care after generations of getting them to try to start caring. They care more about having nukes to destroy Pakistan and how many billionaires th country has, but not about their own drinking water. People also have accepted they can just get bottled water (much of it is counterfeit and simple tap water) and they can give a shit about their fresh water supplies and continue to blame the British.

    We also can’t forget that industries like factories and such simply discharge chemicals directly into the drains and sewage, rivers and streams and in the ground. All this ends up in the tap water and makes it so potentially there’s not enough purification in the world that can make the water safe.

  5. Every news from India I see solidifies the stereotypes there are about this country 🤦‍♂️

  6. >Residents of a congested, lower-income neighbourhood in Indore, Madhya Pradesh’s commercial capital, had been warning authorities for months about foul-smelling tap water. Their complaints went unheeded, despite the city’s much-lauded ranking for waste segregation and other cleanliness measures.

    So the ranking is bullshit. The authorities obviously don’t care.

  7. Human-Web-4455 on

    Condolences to the affected families. This is not a good way to go with all that dehydration and multiple organs shutting down. 10 people dying and 2500 people getting sick clearly shows a lack of apathy from the local government of the city, which was considered to be the cleanest in the country for eight years running (some buffoonery).

  8. Suspicious_Trick6372 on

    Oh my god what is wrong with that country. Those poor, poor people, RIP. And they even fucking complained for months. Their fucking government is so inept and killing people, literally

  9. xXMr_PorkychopXx on

    For a country with over 1 billion people they don’t seem to care about their people? Why exactly? Has India EVER prospered beyond what we know it as today?

  10. foofyschmoofer8 on

    Reminds me of that video where the old Indian guy says you’ll be fine swimming and drinking from the river if you have faith that the river will “purify” you

  11. Aggressive_Chain_920 on

    Wouldn’t sewer water look and taste very undrinkable? How bad is their regular water that they can’t even tell the difference?

  12. wheelienonstop8 on

    If even Indians die it must have been really bad. My brother’s business partner has a friend (white, from central Europe) who vacationed in India once and jumped into the water at the mouth of the Ganges river, from a sightseeing boat, on a dare. He spent the next two weeks hovering at death’s door in the intensive care unit of an Indian hospital and still hasnt fully recovered, several years later.

  13. Underwater_Karma on

    I worked for a company that used to rotate management to our India office for two week stints. Thing was 100% of them got sick. Some needed hospitalization, some just had diarrhea for 2 weeks, but everyone was sick.

    People eventually started refusing to go.

    This story is like turning it up to 11. If even locals are sick and dying, wtf?

  14. I always figured they were immune to anything in sewage at this point. Isn’t this just normal? I’ve been to mumbai once in my life, only for a day since it was a stopover for a longer trip, and my god outside of a few select areas the whole place smelled like a mixture of gasoline, piss, and shit.

  15. Tall-Abrocoma-5879 on

    While what happened here is definitely a terrible thing that deserves to be investigated, the racism in the comment section against us insane. There’s a line to dehumanizing an ethnicity.

  16. Who is crazy enough to drink tap water in India? Cool country to visit with great food and so much culture, but I don’t drink tap water there…

  17. momentum4lyfe on

    Absolutely vile, I hope India’s air and water quality improve, noone deserves this. Obviously they don’t align with the West but maybe China can help them.

  18. It’s heartbreaking to hear about the death of the poor baby. The article quotes the father saying that the water was “filtered” and fed to the bottle-fed baby. Do water filtration systems installed at home not remove such contaminants?

  19. * And nobody could tell the difference until folks were dropping dead.
    * These people have nuclear weapons at their disposal.