Centre’s potable water mission may miss 2024 target

Centre’s potable water mission may miss 2024 target

Subject :Schemes

Context:

• The government’s ambitious Har Ghar Jal initiative to provide all rural households in India with potable water connections by 2024 under its flagship Jal Jeevan Mission is likely to fall short of its target.

Details:

• Only 75% of village homes are likely to have taps delivering drinking water by April 2024.
• At the time of the announcement of the scheme in 2019, only 16% of rural households had tap water.
• The scheme got delayed due to:
  • The COVID-19 pandemic,
  • A dearth of qualified manpower in the States to make tanks, cisterns and water connections of acceptable quality.
  • The scale of the exercise,
  • State-specific issues and
  • The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war led to a shortage of steel and cement for the construction of pipes.

Expected timeline for completion of the project:

• About 75% of households are to be covered by March 2024 and 80% by December. 
• Of the nearly 19.5 crore households that are targeted under the scheme, there are about one crore households (5% of the total) where work hasn’t even begun.

Jal Jeevan Mission:

• Launched in 2019
• Comes under the Jal Shakti ministry.
• The Jal Jeevan Mission has a financial outlay of ₹3.60 lakh crore, with the Centre funding 50% of the cost and the remainder being borne by States and Union Territories.
• The mission’s stated objective is to provide ‘functional’ tap connections that give at least 55 litres per person per day, of potable or drinking water.
• So far, according to data on the Jal Shakti Ministry portal, about 63% of rural households have tap connections, meaning that about 9.1 crore households have benefitted from the programme since 2019.

System of certification under the scheme:

• There is a system of ‘certification’ wherein the gram panchayats in a village which district and block level authorities report as fully connected call a quorum, and upload a video attesting the veracity of the claim.
• Of the nearly 1,68,000 villages that are reported as ‘Har Ghar Jal’ where all houses have tap water, only 58,357 villages have been so ‘certified’, suggesting that the gap between reported and verified connections is wide.
• Two mechanisms for independent verification:

1. An independent audit agency conducts a survey by preparing a representative sample and interviewing respondents on whether the installed water connections are actually delivering water to their satisfaction.
2. A panel of National WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygeine) experts who appraise a section of villages on the quality of services provided. Their feedback is immediately provided to States and to us.

• One such survey was conducted in October 2022, covering 13,303 villages, of which 5,298 were reported as Har Ghar Jal villages and consisting of nearly 300,000 households.
• It was found that only 62% of households had fully functional connections.

A scenario in various states:

• Of the top 10 States that have reported over 96% of coverage, two — Bihar and Telangana — have zero villages that have certified their connection status. This was because both States did not rely on Central funds for their drinking water supply programmes.
• Only eight States and Union Territories so far have reported all their villages as 100% connected, but nearly all of them were well connected in 2019 itself, according to data on the web portal.
• Haryana, Gujarat and Punjab – the largest of these States – already had over 50% coverage in 2019.
  • In Uttar Pradesh, only 5.1 lakh (or 1%) of households reported tap connections in 2019.
    • This grew to 32 lakh by August 2021 and then grew slower to 42 lakh by August 2022.
    • In the last 10 months, it jumped to 1.3 crore or about half the total rural households in the State.
    • However, of U.P.’s 98,455 villages, only 13,085 have reported being fully connected and only 2,837 of them have certified themselves.
    • Thus, only about 3% of U.P. villages can be said to be 100% certified as Har Ghar Jal villages.
  • In Rajasthan, 11 lakh households had tap connections in 2019, which has risen to about 44 lakh in June 2023.
    • Of its 43,249 villages, only 1,146 are reportedly fully connected, only half of which have been certified so.
  • In West Bengal, where the number of connected households grew from 2.1 lakh to 62 lakh between 2019 and 2023, the number of villages reporting 100% connections are 2,654 or about 6% of the State’s villages.
    • Of these, only about a fourth are certified.