The poisoned taps of Peeragarhi

“The tap water at home is sometimes yellow, at other times it is blue, black or foamy. The water smells just like a sewer. We have been using this water for six months,” says Roshan, a 22-year-old tailor living in West Delhi's Peeragarhi village. He has been unwell with a stomach ache and fever for three consecutive days. Somebody in his family of four is always ill.

In Peeragarhi, once a village on the outskirts of the capital city now subsumed by its urban sprawl, dozens of residents have suffered gastrointestinal problems or high temperatures after drinking contaminated tap water. Since June 2024, every one of the approximately 1,000 households in the locality have received foul-smelling water through the municipal supply.

Dozens of small and big factories dot the lanes of Peeragarhi. Until about two decades ago, say locals, mainly plastic goods manufacturing units stood here. Over time, however, industrial units manufacturing paints, dyes, shoes, electronics and motors, among other things, also started to emerge.

Roshan's father Biswanath is a day wage labourer in one of these factories. When he migrated from Bihar to Delhi 15 years ago, Peeragarhi became his home because the village satisfied his basic needs — employment, food and water.

Like Biswanath’s family, most households in Peeragarhi spend nearly 10 per cent of their monthly family income on clean drinking water, averaging Rs. 100 a day.

“Everybody in Peeragarhi is sick,” says Neelam, another resident. Besides the stomach pain and febrile patients, some neighbours developed a rash on their skin. “It is all because of this contaminated water. We use it for all household activities including cleaning, bathing and the toilet. For drinking, we have to purchase water cans.”

Neelam owns the narrow three-storey house rented by Biswanath’s family. “Where will I get 56 rupees every day only for drinking water when my husband is chronically ill and my son is unemployed?” Neelam asks.

A family of five requires, on average, two cans of 20 litres each every day, purchased from one of the three local vendors at Rs. 60 a can.

Installing a groundwater pump is out of the question—it is prohibited by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee regulations since 2019, in order to maintain groundwater levels. The household tap is thus the only source of water for residents, now supplemented by the purchased jerry cans of water.

On July 22, 2024, videos of bright blue and foamy water flowing from the taps of Peeragarhi village went viral on social media platforms. In one of these clips, a resident of the village is heard calling his household tap water ‘jeher’ (poison).

In response, Delhi’s then Water Minister Atishi ordered the chief secretary of the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), Naresh Kumar, to investigate. The DJB set up an investigation team, but its findings were not made public.

While newspaper reports quoted DJB officials as saying sewage from a damaged sewer line had contaminated water lines in Peeragarhi, residents said they knew exactly what had happened.

“The JCB (an earth-moving machine) came, and in front of us, uprooted all the pipelines. They did not differentiate between water pipelines and sewer lines. We began to receive contaminated water through the taps ever since they dug up the roads,” Subodh Paswan, who works at a pump repair shop in Peeragarhi village, says.

It was the recent construction work at the Peeragarhi metro rail station that damaged underground pipelines and sewers, causing not only tap water contamination but also a serious clogging of sewer lines, say residents.

The construction of the Peeragarhi metro station, along the Green Line, is part of the fourth phase of expansion of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC). The station will emerge as the interchange point for the Magenta and Green Lines. Upon completion of the construction work, the passenger footfall at Peeragarhi metro station is expected to increase five-fold.

Despite multiple attempts, officials of the DJB and the DMRC did not respond to requests for a comment on the issue of contamination of water lines in the area due to damage by road-digging.

Prahalad is a labourer hired by the DJB on contract to clean the sewers in and around Peeragarhi. Every day, he cleans a minimum of six sewerholes that are filled to the brim with inky black sewage. Often, he has to call for a suction machine to desilt the manhole, while at other times he uses a portable motor and tube or a bucket and rope to draw out the sludge.

“All this sewer water would otherwise go to Keshopur treatment plant for recycling, but the sewer lines are broken because of the metro construction,” says Prahalad, a migrant worker from Bihar, an energetic man with a lean build and serious demeanour.

The Keshopur Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) of the DJB is located 3 kilometres from the village and can treat 80,000 litres of sewage daily.

As an adaptive strategy while the water supply continues to be contaminated, Peeragarhi village has fallen back on a ‘baori’ or dug-well in the premises of a local temple. Head priest Hari Shankar Shastri says, “This is the only freshwater source the village is left with. There were many wells earlier, but they all dried up.” He says the water from the baori is considered sacred by the residents of Peeragarhi.

Pradeep Kaushik, a resident of Peeragarhi village who has lived here since his birth, says a meeting of local community leaders was held a few weeks ago inside the temple, on the issue of drinking water. “People from DMRC and Delhi Jal Board were also present and they told us that the sewer lines of the area are very old. The entire pipeline system needs to be replaced,” he says.

According to Shastri, the DJB officials visited the baori too, to check its water level, which has declined over the years. “Other than a routine inspection, not much has ever been done for the baori,” the head priest says.

The Delhi Jal Board’s Sewage Master Plan 2031, drafted in June 2014, proposes setting up 74 new sewage treatment plants (STPs), though it does not address how the currently active STPs may be first optimised. The master plan concedes, however, that treated water does get contaminated by wastewater on account of faulty pipelines.

The existing sewer network in Delhi, measuring 8,300 km of sewer pipelines, is old and worn out. Even if sewer lines were to be replaced, urban villages will be the last to see the change, residents know.

The master plan for sewer lines excludes urban villages such as Peeragarhi. Meanwhile, in the village, amid multiple government agencies building or maintaining infrastructure, a locality of working-class people waits months for a solution to a worsening health crisis.