Union Jal Shakti Minister C.R. Paatil said at a public event on Monday that the government was conceiving a “new project” to ensure that rural households, which were provided taps under the ambitious Jal Jeevan Mission but had not yet been able to avail water, would soon be provided potable water.
“In some places, we have not been able to fully accomplish the Prime Minister’s target,” Mr. Paatil said at a workshop organised for officers in the Ministry. “Some people say in jest that we have taps but no water. We are in the process of setting up a new project, where in a time-bound manner, we shall ensure that households with taps and no water, and those without taps are all covered,” he added.
The ₹3.6 lakh crore Jal Jeevan Mission was implemented after Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised from the ramparts of the Red Fort in 2019 to provide potable tap water to every rural household in India.
As of June 25, the scheme had encompassed 77% of its target household, officials from the Ministry said at an event on Monday.
Overall, 15 crore households out of a targeted 19 crore have been provided with tap water connections. However, as The Hindu has earlier pointed out, there is a difference between a household getting a tap connection and the daily quota of 55 litres per person day of water being provided.
To measure households that have been provided water connections, the water supply departments of the States or Union Territories aggregate the numbers provided by districts of the households, anganwadi or schools in their respective administrative units who have been provided tap water connections. These figures are provided to the Jal Shakti Ministry at the Centre. By this measure, 19 crore rural households have been provided tap connections.
However, the Ministry has also put in place a parallel system wherein villages, via their gram panchayats, self-certify if all households within their precincts are actually getting the reported tap water. This approach is meant to double-check that the figures provided by the States tally with the numbers on the ground.
The Jal Shakti Ministry has a dedicated portal that maintains statistics of targets achieved by States where this information is public.
According to this data, out of the 2,24,678 villages where administrations claimed to have ensured 100% tap connectivity, only a little over half, or 1,21,974 villages, have self-certified for tap water connections. There is also no direct way to estimate from the self-certified villages how many of the claimed 19 crore households actually have functional tap water connections.
