POHA as policy | Performance Over Human Accountability

In Indian cities, people die every day in ways that rarely provoke institutional reckoning. They die quietly in overcrowded public hospitals, from unsafe air, contaminated water, and collapsing infrastructure. Because they are not influential, wealthy, or famous, their deaths are quickly absorbed into the language of fate, destiny, or inevitability. We mourn briefly, if at all, and move on.

What rarely follows is a serious interrogation of State failure. What almost always follows is political appropriation, where such deaths are mined for outrage, narrative, and electoral positioning, to be recycled across successive cycles without altering the conditions that produced them.

The deaths caused by contaminated drinking water in Indore are not a local mishap that demands sympathy before moving on. They are an institutional indictment.

At least 10 citizens, including infants and elderly residents, lost their lives after sewage entered the potable water supply in the Bhagirathpura area. Investigations have traced the cause to a poorly constructed toilet at a police outpost, positioned directly above a drinking water pipeline, allowing waste to leach into the system.

The significance of this tragedy lies in its banality. No advanced technology failed. No extraordinary circumstance intervened. What collapsed was the most basic expectation of governance: that the State will protect citizens from foreseeable harm. Complaints had been raised. Environmental risks had been documented earlier. Knowledge was present within the system. Institutional response was absent.

The setting deepens the unease.

Indore has been repeatedly projected as a national exemplar of urban governance, celebrated for cleanliness, and civic discipline. Its achievements in waste management are substantial and deserve recognition. Yet those achievements now sit alongside a failure so elemental that it compels a re-examination of how success itself is being defined.

Political economy of applause

India’s development narrative has increasingly been shaped by what can be showcased. Rankings, awards, certifications, and national recognition have become powerful instruments of political legitimacy. They simplify complexity, and reward speed. They also distort priorities.

Administrative attention follows visibility. Political capital follows celebration. Systems that produce immediate and demonstrable outcomes rise in importance. Systems that demand continuous and invisible discipline struggle to compete.

Drinking water safety belongs to this latter category. Its success is silent and, therefore, undervalued. Its failure announces itself only through illness and death.

This is not a matter of individual negligence alone. It reflects a deeper political economy of governance, where reward structures privilege appearance over assurance. Policymakers must confront an uncomfortable truth. When development is assessed through selective metrics, institutions learn to optimise those metrics, not the underlying systems that sustain life.

The question is not why one toilet was badly built. The question is why a governance framework allowed such a failure to persist undetected and uncorrected within a city that believed itself exemplary.

Governance as performance, not protection

Citizens do not experience governance through speeches or posts. They experience it through predictability; through infrastructure that does not require vigilance from those it serves.

The existence of prior contamination warnings in Indore is, therefore, central to understanding the failure. The system was not ignorant. It was inert. That inertia reflects an erosion of administrative seriousness, where responding decisively to unglamorous risks no longer carries institutional reward.

Policymakers must ask themselves difficult questions. What compels action when failure remains invisible? How are officials incentivised to prioritise prevention over presentation? Where does accountability reside when responsibility is spread across departments that intersect only when something goes wrong?

The most consequential issue raised by the Indore deaths concerns accountability and the value accorded to human life. In India, preventable deaths frequently trigger procedural responses that diffuse responsibility. What typically follows is depressingly familiar. A handful of transfers provide the appearance of action, an inquiry supplies procedural cover, and administrative closure is declared with quiet relief. Little changes beneath the surface.

As a society, we mirror this institutional amnesia. We move rapidly from tragedy to the next headline, from outrage to gossip, mistaking attention for engagement, and closure for correction, while the conditions that produced failure remain firmly intact.

A serious State treats preventable death as a breach of its most fundamental obligation. Authority flows from the assurance that institutional failure will carry consequence, regardless of rank or convenience.

For a country aspiring to global leadership, this dimension cannot remain unresolved. Policymakers must confront whether existing systems convey that every life carries equal weight, or whether some deaths are absorbed as administrative inevitabilities.

For once, the story became national not because a life was lost, but because a question was asked. Sadly, ironic.

Democratic Irony

A journalist, on camera, chose to press a powerful state minister rather than accept rehearsed condolences. That moment itself became news, which should trouble us more than it does.

In a functioning democracy, when the act of questioning authority is treated as a deviation from the norm, it reveals how accustomed we have become to accepting everyday loss as collateral. We speak of progress even as lives are quietly expended, as though routine deaths from polluted air, unsafe water, or failing public systems are an acceptable toll on the road to national success. It is worth asking, with seriousness rather than sentiment, whether this is the trajectory we truly intend to call development.

The Indore tragedy reveals the distance between India’s developmental self-confidence and its institutional depth. Cities are pushing narratives faster than they are building resilience. Governance narratives are advancing faster than governance capacity.

We have become a society that tolerates deaths caused by civic failure so long as they do not intrude upon our own comfort or status, accepting toxic air, unsafe water, and broken public systems as someone else’s misfortune.

Even as our lives become increasingly politicised through forwards, slogans, and memes, our actual participation in demanding accountable governance has thinned, leaving indifference to fill the space where civic responsibility once resided.

Until governance recentres itself on institutional responsibility, accountability, and the everyday protection of life, tragedies like Indore will recur. They will continue to puncture the narratives of progress we project, reminding us that ambition without moral seriousness carries a human cost.

(The writer is a corporate adviser and independent director on corporate boards.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.