If a “Smart City” can’t keep human waste out of a child’s glass of water, it isn’t progress—it’s a death trap.
The BJP’s glossy “Gujarat Model” has hit a lethal dead end in the state’s own capital. While the ruling party spends millions branding Gandhinagar as a high-tech “Viksit Bharat” hub, the city’s pediatric wards are overflowing with children poisoned by the government’s own infrastructure.
A massive typhoid outbreak has exposed a sickening truth: in the rush to cut ribbons on a ₹257-crore water project, the administration effectively plumbed the city’s drinking lines into its sewers.
This isn’t just an accident; it’s a criminal display of administrative rot. Investigations confirm that engineering teams, operating under the BJP-led Municipal Corporation, laid new drinking water pipes directly alongside—and often touching—rotting sewer lines. When high-pressure water was introduced, the system didn’t bring “24×7 progress”; it sucked in raw human waste and delivered it to the dinner tables of Sectors 24 to 28. With over 104 patients now hospitalized, the government’s response has been a masterclass in optics over action: Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Deputy CM Harsh Sanghavi have made their “emergency calls,” yet the only solution offered to the public is a primitive order to boil water and swallow chlorine.
This Gujarat crisis is a carbon copy of the horror currently unfolding in Indore, India’s cleanest city which is another “award-winning” BJP stronghold. In the Bhagirathpura area in Indore, a public toilet at a police outpost was built directly over a main drinking water pipeline without a septic tank. For weeks, residents begged officials to investigate the foul-smelling sludge coming from their taps. They were ignored so that the city could maintain its PR-friendly status as India’s “cleanest.”
The result was an avoidable bloodbath. While the official death toll is kept at four, local residents claim at least 15 people have died and over 2800 people taken sick by a cocktail of E. coli and cholera-causing bacteria. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has stepped in, but the damage is done. Whether in Madhya Pradesh or Gujarat, the BJP’s “Smart City” playbook follows a grim pattern: prioritize multi-crore tenders and “clean city” awards until the morgues start to fill up.
Meanwhile, Gujarat Congress has slammed the BJP and its’ Smart City claims.
“As we enter 2026, “The gap between the BJP’s digital slogans and its physical failures is widening into a chasm. The party’s obsession with “smart” metrics has clearly come at the expense of basic human dignity. In Gandhinagar, the 63 surveillance teams conducting door-to-door surveys are merely a band-aid on a gaping wound caused by a government that forgot that development starts with a pipe that doesn’t leak sewage”, Gujarat Congress president Amit Chavda has said. Rajyasabha MP Shaktisinh Gohil has slammed the BJP for its “hollow obsession with optics,” pointing out that while the government holds global summits at GIFT City, it cannot provide safe water to a five-year-old in Sector 24. Amit Chavda has accused the administration of “criminal corruption,” alleging that the technical failure—where drinking water pipes were laid directly through sewer zones—is the direct result of sub-standard work by favored contractors. The Congress has demanded the immediate arrest of the municipal engineers and a high-level judicial probe into the ₹257-crore tender.
Also Read: Vibrant Gujarat? Ask The Dead Farmers. And Their Families. https://www.vibesofindia.com/vibrant-gujarat-model-raises-questions/
