A one-member judicial commission of inquiry has confirmed that 24 people died in Indore’s Bhagirathpura between December 2025 and February 2026 after consuming water contaminated by sewage supplied through Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) pipelines, and has blamed a delayed tender process for laying a new Narmada-water pipeline as the primary cause of the epidemic.
The commission, headed by retired Madhya Pradesh High Court judge justice Sushil Kumar Gupta, submitted its 150-page report last week to the Indore bench of the high court. Local residents have continued to insist the toll is higher — 36, they say — but the court’s order at last week’s hearing directed that the report be shown only to advocates at the registrar’s office and barred its public release.
Advocate Manish Yadav, one of the petitioners in the case, said the commission had held IMC engineers and an additional commissioner responsible for delaying the tender process meant to replace damaged sewage and drinking-water lines with the new Narmada supply network.
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“This led to the mixture of sewage and drinking water that was supplied to households in Bhagirathpura,” he said, declining to name the officers found guilty.
{{/usCountry}}“This led to the mixture of sewage and drinking water that was supplied to households in Bhagirathpura,” he said, declining to name the officers found guilty.
{{/usCountry}}Citing postmortem reports quoted in the commission’s findings, Yadav said the deaths were caused by gastrointestinal infection, diarrhoea and dehydration following the consumption of water in which pathogens including E. coli, Salmonella and Vibrio cholerae had been detected.
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A second advocate involved in the proceedings, who asked not to be named, said the report gave a clean chit to then IMC commissioner Dileep Yadav — who was removed after the outbreak — and to Indore collector Shivam Verma, who had been posted as IMC commissioner when the tender process was delayed in July 2025.
HT could not independently verify the report’s contents, which the high court has barred from public release. Messages seeking comment from the IMC, the state urban development department, Dileep Yadav and Shivam Verma had not been answered at the time of going to press.
The commission has also recommended raising the compensation paid to families of the deceased from ₹2 lakh to ₹4 lakh, with an upper band of up to ₹20 lakh in certain categories of loss, though the report did not specify the criteria.
The high court has been hearing the matter since the outbreak began on December 24, 2025.
On January 27, it appointed Justice Gupta to probe nine points including the cause and source of contamination, the actual death toll, the adequacy of the medical response, preventive measures, long-term infrastructural reforms, and fixing responsibility on officials found prima facie guilty.