‘Over 1 mn homes to get tap water by year-end’

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.