JJM Implementation Crisis

When a flagship programme meant to deliver piped water to every rural household ends up as a byword for waste and neglect, something has gone badly wrong. The House Committee's findings on the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) in Jammu and Kashmir make for sobering reading: 63 per cent of the 3,253 Water Supply Schemes taken up under the mission are non-operational, despite an expenditure of around Rs 7,000 crore. Even more troubling, the Committee notes that many of the remaining 37 per cent claimed as "functional" are not, in fact, fully operational. The numbers cited in the Assembly this week only sharpen the picture. Legislators across party lines say over 3,000 schemes have lain defunct for nearly two years, with contractors downing tools the moment the House Committee was constituted - an odd and telling coincidence that itself demands scrutiny. Meanwhile, roughly Rs 1,350 crore in work-done claims remain unpaid, split between single village schemes, multi-village schemes and retrofitting projects. That such a situation could persist under a Centrally sponsored scheme meant to bring "Har Ghar Nal" to every household is difficult to justify.

What makes this affair particularly galling is the disproportion between spend and outcome. Seven thousand crore rupees is not a trivial sum, yet it has produced pipelines that stop short of villages, schemes awaiting a final connection, and women and girls still trudging distances to fetch water that piped infrastructure was supposed to deliver to their doorsteps. The Committee's 1,300-page report, weighing nearly four kilograms, is itself a monument to the scale of the exercise - but paper alone quenches no thirst.

Three things must now follow without further delay. First, the pending payments to contractors - verified and validated - should be released so that stalled work can resume; punishing genuine contractors for administrative delays only compounds the crisis. Second, the irregularities in planning, procurement and quality control flagged by the Committee must be investigated with an actual accountability trail and action for shoddy execution rather than allowing the matter to dissolve into bureaucratic ambiguity. Third, the reconciliation requirements under JJM 2.0 - the Sujal Gaon IDs, updated MoUs and financial verification - need to be expedited rather than used as a pretext for further delay. Jammu and Kashmir's people have waited long enough. A scheme conceived to end their dependence on unreliable water sources cannot itself become another symbol of unfulfilled promises. The Government owes them action, not further reports.