₹60k cr to deliver tap water to 38mn households this yr
THE PREVIOUS BUDGET HAD SET ASIDE ₹50K CRORE FOR THE PIPED WATER MISSION
NEW DELHI: The Union Budget 2022-23 has allocated ₹60,000 crore to extend tapped water coverage to 38 million households in 2022-23, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday.
The current coverage of “Har Ghar, Nal Se Jal”, the government’s flagship scheme to connect every household with tap water, is 80.7 million households, the FM said. “Of this, 5.5 crore (50.5 million) households were provided tap water in last two years itself.”
The previous budget had allocated ₹50,000 crore for the piped water mission.
The finance minister stressed the government’s programmes were designed to deliver tangible goods to the public to reduce poverty, from cooking gas to potable water. “Since 2014, our government’s focus has been on empowerment of citizens, especially the poor and the marginalised. Measures have included programmes that have provided housing, electricity, cooking gas, and access to water.”
The finance minister said the implementation of the Ken-Betwa river link project at an estimated cost of ₹44,605 crore would be taken up soon. “This is aimed at providing irrigation benefits to 9.08 lakh hectare of farmers’ lands, drinking water supply for 62 lakh people, 103 MW of hydro and 27 MW of solar power,” the FM said.
To provide greater access to irrigation and drinking water, the FM said draft project reports of five river links, namely Damanganga-Pinjal, Par-TapiNarmada, Godavari-Krishna, Krishna-Pennar and PennarCauvery have been finalised.
“Once a consensus is reached among the beneficiary states, the Centre will provide support for implementation,” the FM said.
Under the Jal Jeevan MissionHar Ghar Jal scheme, every rural household is to be provided with a functional tap water connection by 2024.
Over 120 million households in India lack access to clean water near their homes, the highest in the world, according to a UN Water report of 2014. In 2018, just 18.2% of rural households had piped water supply. By 2019, this figure increased by 9 percentage points.
The country has had several public programmes to bring clean water to rural residences, such as the National Drinking Water Mission launched in 1986, but the goal of providing piped drinking water to every household entered a mission mode with the Har Ghar Jal programme (water for every home) under the Jal Jeevan Mission.
Poor-quality water causes diseases such as diarrhoea, the third leading cause of childhood mortality in India, according to researchers Subitha Lakshminarayanan and Ramakrishnan Jayalakshmy, who work at Puduchery’s Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research and Indira Gandhi Medical College, respectively.
“The key issue with the Jal Jeevan mission is sustainability. While connecting households with a water source is the easier part, past experience has shown that maintaining sustainability of the source is critical for longer-term availability of water. One would have wanted to see some policy action on this front from the budget,” said Avadhesh Kumar, a former water-policy consultant with the erstwhile Planning Commission.