Indore Water Contamination: 18 Families Compensated Even as MP Govt Pegs Death Toll at 8
New Delhi: As many as 18 families have been compensated for the death of family members from drinking contaminated water in Indore even as the Madhya Pradesh government has maintained that the official death toll is eight.
Several people in Indore’s Bhagirathpura are said to have died after severe vomiting and diarrhea between December 24 and January 6, while many others were hospitalised.
According to government records cited by the Indian Express, the MP government gave cheques worth Rs 2 lakh each to the families of 18 people, even as it told the court earlier this week that eight people had died from drinking contaminated water.
While a police outpost toilet without a septic tank was initially suspected of being the source of the contamination, authorities are now looking into local borewell connections that could have caused the contamination.
Chief minister Mohan Yadav said on Wednesday that the focus should not be on how many had died as the loss of even a single life was “extremely painful”.
“Therefore, we don’t delve into statistics. It’s a different matter that the administration follows its own procedures. Generally, only those cases where post-mortems were performed were considered valid figures,” Yadav said.
The MP high court rapped the state government on Tuesday for its insensitive response to the tragedy and the ambiguity in the death toll.
“Such an insensitive response from the government… this incident has brought such a bad name to Indore, which is one of the cleanest cities of the country. It has become a news matter all over India and the world too,” the court had said in response to the government’s explanation on how the counting process had been complicated by natural deaths and the lack of post-mortem reports.
A senior government official quoted by the paper said, “The local administration, including senior leaders such as Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya, decided to provide cheques to all reported cases of death and not wait for a final report. Hence the cheques were distributed. A death audit is underway to ascertain the actual toll.
The bacterial test conducted by the Indore Municipal Corporation on January 3 found faecal coliform bacterial count in 35 of 51 samples collected in Bhagirathpura. The count ranged from 13 to 360 per ml, the paper reported. The number considered to be safe by Indian standards is zero.
A senior official of the IMC said that the “contamination level found in Bhagirathpura is far beyond what is considered safe”.
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