Despite recurring bouts of water-borne diseases across the country, states do not pay adequate attention to drinking water quality
NEW DELHI: Despite recurring bouts of water-borne diseases across the country, states do not pay adequate attention to drinking water quality, observed the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG)’s audit report on accelerated rural water supply (ARWS).
The CAG also found that most states had inadequate water testing infrastructure. The major water quality problems are flurosis, brackiness/salinity, aresenic, excess iron, and nirates. There are separate schemes for treating fluorosis, desalination, removal of excess iron and nitrates. Under ARWS, up to 15% of funds can be utilised by states to tackle these problems.
Ten states — Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Meghalaya, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh — had failed to a assign a premier institute with the task of checking water quality. Six districts in Arunachal Pradesh, which claimed to have conducted water-quality tests, had no qualified staff.
Assam neither had any new laboratory for testing water quality nor were the facilities in the existing ones updated. In Bihar, two out of nine districts did not have a laboratory. In Chhattisgarh, no funds were used to improve the infrastructure in labs. The lab in Raipur was used as a guest house.
The ARWS guidelines stipulate testing of all water sources at least once a year.
However, in 17 states — Arunachal, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim and Uttarakhand — no tests were conducted.
In Himachal Pradesh, against the requirement of 941 tests to be conducted during
2002-07, only 91 samples were checked. In Haryana, against a target of 94,000 samples during 2002-07, only 13,980 were checked out of which 1,598 samples were found to be unfit for consumption.
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