50mn families got water since 2019: PM Modi
NEW DELHI: Fifty million households have been provided with water connection since the launch of Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019 and now tap water is reaching every household in about 125,000 villages, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Saturday. He also asserted that today’s India has done more work on this front in just two years than what was done in seven decades.
Speaking after interacting with gram panchayats and village water and sanitation committees (VWSC) on the Jal Jeevan Mission, Modi said the mission was village-driven and its vision was not just to make water accessible to the people, but it was also a big movement of decentralisation. In an apparent dig at previous Congress dispensations, Modi said those who had the responsibility of policymaking for a long time lived in abundance of water.
“In the places where these people lived, they had never seen such a problem with water. They did not even know what the pain of life without water is. They had water in the house, water in the swimming pool, an abundance of water,” he said in his address via video conferencing.
He said such people had never seen poverty which remained an attraction for them, a means of showing off literature and intellectual knowledge. “These people should have strived for an ideal village but they kept liking the shortcomings,” Modi said.
The prime minister asserted that the vision of Jal Jeevan Mission is a village-driven and women-driven movement, and its main base is mass movement and public participation.
Referring to popular conceptions of the problem of water, the prime minister talked of movies, stories, poems that told in detail how the women and children of the village walked miles to fetch water. In the minds of some people, this picture emerges as soon as the name of the village is taken, he noted. The prime minister asked why so few people think about the question as to why these people have to go to some river or pond every day and why the water does not reach these people. “I think those who had the responsibility of policy-making for a long time, should have asked themselves this question,” he said.
Pointing out that from the time of independence till 2019, only three crore households in the country had access to tap water, he said since the launch of Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019, five crore households have been connected with water connections. “Today, water is reaching every household in about 1.25 lakh villages in about 80 districts of the country. In the aspirational districts the number of tap connections have increased from 31 lakh to 1.16 crore,” he said,