Over 1 mn homes to get tap water supply by year-end: Officials

NEW DELHI: Ram Chandra, a 70-year-old villager from Mahoba in Bundelkhand — a rocky and impoverished region dividing Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh — is anxiously biding his time to see a dream become reality by the year-end: a water source at his doorstep.

“Just last week officials told us we can hope to get water right in our homes by December. We have been waiting all our lives for water,” Chandra said over the phone.

Several dozens of engineering teams in the parched region, spanning 69,000 sqkm, are busy laying pipes, finishing construction of overhead tanks, levelling high grounds and sealing off deep groundwater holes as part of a massive project under the flagship Jal Jeevan Mission, a national programme to connect every household in rural India with functioning drinking water taps by 2024.

Authorities overseeing the water mission said nearly 1.11 million rural homes covering a population of 7.2 million people will have access to regular treated tap water supply by the year-end.

Nature has been unkind to the Bundelkhand region, spread over 13 districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, as it witnessed a non-stop seven-year drought between 2003 and 2010.

Water availability is scarce in at least one half of the country but the crisis in the perennially drought-hit Bundelkhand has been severe enough to force waves of outmigration from the area over the past decade.

“Nearly two million (20 lakh) people are gone. They work as labourers in other states. What to do? How can one live without water?” said Diwan Parihar, a local social activist.

The Bundelkhand leg of the Jal Jeevan Mission comprises 467 piped drinking water schemes under 32 projects. Of these, 43 are surface waterbased schemes and 424 are ground water-based.

The current scope of the water projects is expected to benefit 2,608 gram panchayats (village-level administrative units) in seven districts of the region.

Work on Bundelkhand’s water supply network, officials said, has carried on despite the pandemic.

“The UP government has completed about 80% work of water treatment plants in various districts of Bundelkhand, including Jhansi and Mahoba. The construction work is almost complete in more than 50% of our plants,” principal secretary Anurag Srivastava told HT in a text message.