Jal Shakti Minister Paatil Ensures New Plan For Potable Water To Tapped Yet Dry Rural Homes Under Jal Jeevan Mission

Union Jal Shakti Minister C R Paatil announced that the government is working to ensure that rural households, which have not yet received water, will soon be provided with potable water.

The ministry is working on a project to address the issue of households that were given taps under the Jal Jeevan Mission but still lack water supply.

Paatil took over the charge of the Ministry of Jal Shakti in the third term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Rs 3.6 lakh crore Jal Jeevan Mission was launched by the Prime Minister in 2019 with the aim of ensuring 55 litres of water per person per day to every rural household in India.

“In some places, we have not been able to fully accomplish the Prime Minister’s target,” Paatil said at a workshop organised for officers in the ministry.

With cases from villages where taps are installed but water has not reached, he added, “We are in the process of setting up a new project, where in a time-bound manner, we shall ensure that households with taps and no water, and those without taps are all covered.”

As of June, the scheme has reached 77 per cent of its target households, according to ministry officials. As per The Hindu report, there is a difference between a household receiving a tap connection and the daily provision of 55 litres of water per person.

The ministry has also implemented a parallel system where villages, through their gram panchayats, self-certify that all households are receiving the reported tap water, to verify the accuracy of the figures provided by the states.

The Jal Shakti Ministry maintains a public portal that tracks the targets achieved by states. According to this data, out of the 224,678 villages where administrations claimed 100 per cent tap connectivity, only slightly more than half, have self-certified for tap water connections.