NEW DELHI, Aug 18: Jal Jeevan Mission-a flagship programme of the Centre for providing tap connections to the households in the rural areas of the country-accomplished a milestone of providing daily water supply over 1 lakh families in one year, according to the official data.
The project which was announced by the Prime Minister on August 15 last year, covered nearly 2 Crore households with new tap water connections. Also, under the project, every tap connection is linked with Aadhar number of the head of the household.
The water mission aims to provide functional household tap connections (FHTCs) to every rural household of the country by the year 2024. As per the data, districts with 100 per cent tap connections include Gandhinagar(Gujarat), Lahul & Spiti (Himachal Pradesh), Srinagar & Ganderbal (Jammu & Kashmir), SAS Nagar (Punjab) and the districts from the state of Telangana are Adilabad, Karimnagar, Medchal-Malkajgir and Warangal.
According to the data, total number of rural households in the country are 18, 95, 01, 559. The number of rural households with tap connections are 5, 13, 25, 836 (or 27.08 per cent).
On August 15 this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed happiness over the success of ‘Jal Jeevan Mission’ (JJM) scheme saying it provided drinking water from the tap to more than two crore households.
On August 13, Jal Jeevan Mission on its official twitter handle wrote, “As on today, one Crore households have been provided with tap connections in the current year, as a result of relentless efforts by States/ UTs. Since unlock-1, over 1 lakh connections are provided everyday!”
On August 15, 2019, the Prime Minister announced the mission to be implemented in partnership with States to provide tap water connection to every rural household by 2024 with an outlay Rs. 3.60 Lakh Crore.
At the time of launch of JJM, out of total 18.93 Crore rural households (HHs), only 3.23 Crore (17 per cent) had tap water connection. Remaining 15.70 Crore (83 per cent) HHs were to be provided with FHTCs and all tap connections to be made functional to ensure every household in the country to have tap water connections and reliable water supply on long-term basis.
A senior official associated with the scheme said that since the announcement by Mr Modi, work is being done in this direction at a rapid pace. Directions were issued in this regard by December 25 last year.Water committees were formed at the village level , which included 50 percent women members, to ensure that every household in the rural areas gets the benefit of the scheme and no family is left out from the scheme even by mistake.
A Village Action Plan was prepared at the village level to complete the mission.
The official said that the work of providing water from the taps in the village was going on even before but its pace was very slow.
However, as soon as the Prime Minister announced the plan, during the first seven months, 85 lakh houses were provided with tap water.
Due to COVID-19, the work of the scheme was affected in April and May this year, but soon after the coronavirus lockdown measures were eased, the work started at a fast pace and in its first phase, the work of supplying tap water to 85 lakh houses was completed under the scheme and by August 10, this number has increased to over 88 lakhs. (UNI)
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