Gujarat on Wednesday became the seventh state/Union territory to achieve 100 percent household tap water connectivity under the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM). Earlier, Haryana, Telangana, and the smaller states/UTs of Goa, Puducherry, Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu had achieved this milestone.
Launched in 2019, JJM aims to supply 55 liters of water to every person every day in every rural household through functional tap connections by 2024. At present, 10.41 crore or 54.36 percent of the rural households in India out of the targeted 19.15 crore have tap water connections, according to the JJM website.
Uttar Pradesh ranks at the bottom among states with only 19.41 percent of tap water connections. It has managed to provide a tap water supply to 51.28 lakh households out of a total of 2.64 crore. In absolute numbers, Bihar (1.6 crore), Maharashtra (1.03 crore) and Gujarat (91.73 lakh) have provided the highest tap water connections under JJM.
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Since the start of the mission, a whopping 7.17 crore households have been provided tap water connections. The year 2020-21 saw the highest tap water connections at 3.22 crore, followed by 2.05 crore in 2021-22.
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JJM, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project, has been lauded on the global stage for improving health parameters among children. American economist and Nobel Prize winner Michael Kremer recently estimated that the project will save the lives of 1.36 lakh children under the age of five every year. Even the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) lauded the JJM last year, saying that such projects should be implemented in backward nations.
However, the slow implementation of JJM in India’s most populated state of Uttar Pradesh has both officials and activists concerned. “UP’s size, population, and regional variations in water availability all pose formidable challenges, and western UP and the Bundelkhand region have different challenges. The state will have no choice but to adopt different strategies for each of their ecological zones,” VK Madhavan, chief executive of non-profit organisation WaterAid India, recently told a publication.
