Ujjain: The ambitious road-widening drive ahead of the 2028 Simhastha fair is exacting an unexpected toll on Ujjain residents — reliable access to drinking water. As construction crews tear up streets and reroute infrastructure across nearly a dozen stretches of the city, underground pipelines are being damaged daily, throwing the water supply network into persistent disarray.
The irony is hard to miss: even as the Gambhir Dam holds a healthy 350 MCFT of water, thousands of households have none of it.
The Ujjain Municipal Corporation (UMC) is overseeing widening work across most of these stretches, with only the Pipli Naka project under the Ujjain Development Authority (UDA).
The scale of disruption is considerable. The city’s water distribution system — which serves approximately 67,000 registered consumers through 43 overhead tanks — draws its supply primarily from the Gambhir Dam, supplemented by a Narmada water board pipeline and two additional intake points near Triveni and Lal Pul. But with pipeline breaks occurring almost every day in active construction zones, the system is struggling to keep up.
The northern zone, which covers 33 wards compared to 21 in the south, is bearing the greatest burden.
UMC additional commissioner (PHE) Pawan Singh did not sidestep the issue. “Road widening is one of the reasons affecting water supply,” he said, while also pointing to a broader set of problems. “Other causes include low pressure, reduced water levels at the dam, and frequent power cuts. Around 1,000 consumers are currently being affected.”
Mayor Mukesh Tatwal offered a more reassuring view, stating that complaints had reduced following a recent maintenance shutdown and that a dedicated repair team was responding to pipeline damage in widening areas as quickly as it occurred.
The reassurances, however, have done little to calm frustration on the ground. Water supply was suspended twice this month — on May 7 and May 24 — during the peak of summer, both times attributed to maintenance work. Yet complaints have persisted well beyond those shutdowns. Making matters worse, both helpline numbers of the UMC’s public health engineering control room are currently unreachable, leaving residents with no functional channel to report their grievances.
Local opposition leader Ravi Rai argues that the crisis runs deeper than construction disruption alone, pointing to decades of neglect in the city’s water infrastructure. “The supply system is essentially the same one that was installed before 1992, when only 12 tanks were being filled. That number has since grown to 44, but the underlying infrastructure has not kept pace,” he said.
“The city has tripled in size, and the boosting capacity has been completely exhausted. If water is available at the dam, why can’t it be supplied adequately?” he said, adding that tanks are currently being filled to only a fraction of their capacity, resulting in weak pressure across the network.
On Saturday, MLA Anil Jain Kaluheda, Mayor Tatwal, UMC chairperson Kalavati Yadav, and commissioner Abhilash Mishra jointly inspected the Gambhir Dam and subsequently announced a commitment to restoring regular daily supply. Mishra acknowledged that day-to-day operations were being hampered by multiple ongoing issues and assured that each would be addressed.
While UMC addresses the water crisis, several families living in widening zones have lost portions of their homes to the project and are yet to receive any compensation — even as they queue for water in the middle of a punishing summer — a sacrifice that is seemingly among the less visible costs of hosting one of the country’s largest religious gatherings.
