Srinagar, Oct. 3 -- Water is tested to protect lives, not to fill registers. When nearly two lakh samples were examined in sub-divisional laboratories across Jammu and Kashmir over five years, 897 failed. None of these failures were referred onward for confirmation. The prescribed chain of escalation, sub-divisional from district to state, was broken. The result was a monitoring system that produced numbers but withheld accountability.

The audit shows that failures were concentrated in Kashmir, with smaller numbers in Jammu, yet every one of them remained confined to the lowest tier of testing. District laboratories also recorded failures but did not pass them to the state level. At the state laboratory, every test was marked as passed, ...