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Why water is becoming India's biggest food safety challenge
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Thursday, 09 July, 2026, 16 : 00 PM [IST]
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Ashwin Bhadri
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Between January 2025 and January 2026, sewage-contaminated piped water triggered disease outbreaks in twenty-six cities across twenty two states and union territories, sickening at least 5,500 people and killing 34. Sixteen state capitals appeared on that list.
Gandhinagar, Gujarat's own capital, hospitalised more than 150 children with typhoid in a single week after contaminated water entered the supply. In Bengaluru, residents of an entire layout reported diarrhoea and stomach infections after sewage mixed with drinking water lines. In Patna, residents describe tap water so polluted it causes itching on contact and cannot even be used for washing clothes.
These incidents did not happen in isolation, and not because India lacks water testing standards. They happened because the gap between what water testing requires on paper and what actually gets verified at the point of consumption has been widening for years, largely unnoticed a gap that, as this piece will show, runs through both the water flowing from municipal pipes and the water sold back to consumers in sealed bottles.
For most of the conversation around food safety in India, water has occupied a strange blind spot. It is not packaged the way a snack or a sauce is packaged. It does not carry a label that invites scrutiny. It arrives through a pipe or out of a tap, and the assumption that follows it is almost entirely passive: if it is flowing, it is probably fine. That assumption has been getting tested repeatedly over the past two years, and it keeps failing.
The infrastructure story explains part of it. Ageing, corroded pipelines laid decades ago, often running directly alongside sewer lines that were never engineered with adequate separation, now serve cities whose populations have multiplied several times over since those pipes were installed.
When a sewer line cracks under that strain, the higher-pressure sewage frequently wins the contest for available space, and it enters the drinking water network rather than the other way around. Almost every contamination outbreak across those twenty six cities followed this same basic mechanism. The fix is not mysterious. It is expensive, slow, and politically unglamorous, which is exactly why it keeps getting deferred until an outbreak forces the issue.
What has changed more recently, and what deserves closer attention, is the regulatory response to water that never travels through a municipal pipe at all. FSSAI reclassified packaged drinking water and mineral water as high-risk food, a category that previously included dairy, meat, and prepared foods but had never included bottled water.
India's packaged water market is large and growing fast, which is precisely why the gap mattered: a sector this size had, until now, escaped the scrutiny applied to far smaller categories.
The reclassification followed the removal of mandatory Bureau of Indian Standards certification for the category, a regulatory gap that FSSAI's own officials acknowledged needed to be closed before it became a vacuum. Under the new framework, manufacturers must pass mandatory inspections before licensing and submit to annual third-party audits, treating bottled water with the same scrutiny historically reserved for far more visibly perishable products. That shift matters because the public perception of packaged water as the safer alternative to tap water has never been entirely accurate, and the data keeps reinforcing that.
Microplastics have been found in the overwhelming majority of tap water samples tested across Indian cities, and bottled water has not proven immune to the same underlying problem, since the source water entering many bottling plants carries contamination that filtration alone does not always fully resolve.
E. coli and other bacteria continue to surface in bottled products tied back to inadequate sanitation at the source rather than failures in the bottling process itself. The packaging changes. The underlying water quality question often does not.
This is the defining shift in how food safety in India needs to be understood over the next decade. Water has historically been treated as infrastructure rather than as food, and that classification gap has real consequences. Infrastructure gets maintained on a budget cycle, while food safety gets tested on a risk cycle, and those are fundamentally different timelines.
A municipal water department fixing a pipeline this year because the capital budget allowed for it is not the same discipline as a food manufacturer testing every batch because regulation requires it.
Treating water as high-risk food, as FSSAI has now formally done for the packaged category, is the correct instinct. The harder, unfinished work is extending that same instinct to the municipal supply that still reaches the overwhelming majority of Indian households who have no packaged alternative and no way to verify what is coming out of their own tap on a given day.
The deeper problem sitting underneath both the municipal outbreaks and the packaged water reclassification is the same one that surfaces in nearly every Indian food safety story eventually: testing exists, and standards exist, but what remains inconsistent is verification at the actual point that matters whether that is a sump in an apartment building, a bottling plant drawing from a compromised borewell, or a pipeline running too close to a sewer line that nobody has inspected in years.
A standard that is not independently verified at the point of consumption is a standard that exists mostly on paper, and paper has never stopped sewage from entering a pipe. India's relationship with water has always assumed abundance solves quality. It does not. As urban populations climb past 500 million by 2030 and ageing infrastructure absorbs ever more pressure it was never designed for, the question that determines whether the next outbreak happens in a named city or stays a near miss is not how much water reaches people. It is whether anyone tested what reached them before they drank it.
(The author is founder & CEO at Equinox Labs)
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