New Delhi: All rural households will have safe drinking water connections by 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in August 2019 when he announced the Har Ghar Jal initiative under the Ministry of Jal Shakti’s Jal Jeevan Mission.
But that’s not likely to happen.
Per a report by The Hindu, only 75% of households are likely to have a water connection by March 2024. The delay is due to several factors, including the pandemic, which slowed operations, and the Russia-Ukraine war, which caused a shortage in raw materials for manufacturing metal pipes, a senior unnamed official told The Hindu.
Barely seven months ago, the Ministry of Jal Shakti had claimed that the Jal Jeevan Mission “is on track to fulfill [the] government’s resolve to provide tap water supply to every rural household by 2024”. In April this year, the Ministry said that one tap connection is being provided every second under the Jal Jeevan Mission in 2023.
Safe water for all
The Har Ghar Jal initiative was announced by Modi on August 15, 2019 and aims to provide every rural household with affordable and regular access to safe drinking water through taps by 2024.
It is also part of India’s progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a set of global goals announced in 2015 that countries across the world have to work towards to improve peoples’ quality of life and protect the planet.
According to the Jal shakti ministry, the Har Ghar Jal program’s components align with the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene (JMP) to monitor progress on SDG 6.1 for safely managed drinking water services.
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At the village level, each local gram panchayat has to declare their village as ‘Har Ghar Jal’ certified through a resolution to mark all households in the village as having access to safe water in their taps. The villages have to ensure that no one is left out – and this includes all schools, anganwadi centres and other public institutions in the village.
However, as per The Hindu‘s report, the target of safe drinking water for rural houses – ‘Har Ghar Jal’ – by 2024 may be unattainable. It says that only three of four rural households are likely to have drinking water tap connections by 2024 and work has not even begun in 5% of rural homes.
How far behind?
Data published on the Jal Jeevan Mission’s official website says that the number of rural households across the country that had access to piped and safe drinking water in August 2019 was 3.23 crore (which is 16.6% of all rural households).
As of July 2, 2023, that number stands at 12.45 crore households. However, this is still only 64% of all rural households.
An unnamed senior official told The Hindu on July 1 that the expectation is that about 75% of households will be covered under the scheme by March 2024, and 80% by December. “That itself would be a huge achievement,” The Hindu quoted the official as saying.
There is also a mismatch between reported and certified connections. As of July 2, 2023, 1,68,150 villages have reported that all their households have a safe drinking water connection. However, only 58,562 of those have been certified.
Apart from villages’ self verification on whether all households have water, there are also two other independent verification mechanisms, The Hindu’s report said. An independent audit agency conducts a survey by interviewing respondents from a representative sample to check if the installed water connections work, officials told The Hindu.
In the second method, a panel of national Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) experts also survey some villages and communicate their findings to the respective states and the Centre, The Hindu quoted the officials as saying.
A survey conducted this way in October 2022 that covered around 13,300 villages (of nearly 3 lakh households) found that only 5,298 villages were Har Ghar Jal villages and only 62% households had fully functional connections, The Hindu reported.
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So far, seven states and union territories have been certified as ‘Har Ghar Jal’. The Ministry of Jal Shakti declared Goa as the first certified Har Ghar Jal state in August 2022, saying that all 2.63 lakh households in the state had access to safe and regular piped water.
However, Goan residents told Mongabay-India in October of the same year that this was not true, and that they still face water shortages. Many houses did not have water connections; some which did, did not have water running through them, the report said.
In May this year, the Revolutionary Goans Party (a regional political party in Goa) spoke about the water shortage in Shiroda, a village in South Goa district, claiming that some areas had no tap connectivity at all, while in others, people depended on water from wells and springs.
What’s causing the delay?
Several factors have contributed to the possibility of not achieving Har Ghar Jal by 2024, officials told The Hindu. The pandemic was one of them. Another was the Russia-Ukraine war that resulted in “major shortages of steel and cement, critical to the manufacture and connection of metal pipes”.
“This led to major price revisions and considerable time was lost in renegotiating contracts and improving supply,” The Hindu quoted a senior official as saying.
The lack of skilled manpower to make acceptable quality tanks, cisterns and water connections was also an issue, the official claimed.
This report on the possibility of India falling short of its 2024 target of Har Ghar Jal comes despite the Jal Shakti ministry’s assertion in December last year that the mission was still on track to achieve its goal.
There’s a fair amount of money being invested by the government in the scheme, too. In 2019, Modi said that the government would spend Rs 3.5 lakh crore over the next five years under the Jal Jeevan Mission.
According to a statement by the Ministry of Jal Shakti, the overall financial commitment for the Jal Jeevan Mission is Rs 3,600 billion (US$ 43.80 billion), which makes it one of the largest welfare programmes in the world.