AIR Spotlight: Milestone Achievements of Jal Jeevan Mission

AIR Spotlight is an insightful program featured daily on the All India Radio News on air. In this program, many eminent panellists discuss issues of importance which can be quite helpful in IAS exam preparation.

This article is about the discussion on: ‘Milestone Achievements of Jal Jeevan Mission’.

Participants:

• Vini Mahajan: Secretary, Department of Drinking Water & Sanitation, Ministry of Jal Shakti
• Gaura Dhawan Lal: AIR Correspondent

Context – The Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) has reached a key milestone by supplying safe and clean drinking water through taps to over 12 crore rural homes across the country and continues to make rapid strides in achieving the ‘Har Ghar Jal’ dream.

Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM)

In 2019, Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) was launched by the GoI to provide Functional Household Tap Connection (FHTC) to every rural household. JJM as mentioned in the Indian Economic Survey 2021 is an appropriate strategy to address the rural-urban gap for bare necessities and improving such necessities enables the country to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On a national scale, GoI announced 3.6 lakh crore rupees for the successful implementation of JJM.

• Jal Jeevan Mission was launched to ensure that every household in the rural villages has a Functional Household Tap Connection (FHTC) by 2024 with an adequate quantity of 55 litres per capita per day (LPCD) in prescribed quality (BIS:10500).
• At the time of the announcement of the launch of JJM by the Prime Minister in 2019, only 3.23 Crore (16.64%) households in villages had access to piped water connections.
• The target under JJM is to cover over 6 lakh villages i.e., over 19 crore households in the country. With the strong and sustained efforts of the states and UTs, over 12 crore rural households (~61%) have portable drinking water of minimum quantity (55 LPCD) and in prescribed quality. The water is to be made available on a regular and sustainable basis even during the hot summer months.
• Jal Jeevan Mission leverages the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, proper utilisation of funds and service delivery. Every water supply asset created under Jal Jeevan Mission is geo-tagged. Hydro-geo morphological (HGM) maps are used in planning a single village scheme to identify drinking water sources and construct aquifer recharge structures. Household tap connections provided by JJM are linked with the Aadhar number of the head of the household and more importantly, all financial transactions are undertaken through the Public Finance Management System (PFMS).

Read more about Jal Jeevan Mission in the linked article.

JJM Challenges 

• Water being a state subject, better coordination between the state and national institutions for effective implementation and monitoring of the infrastructure is important.
• Many states in India face natural calamities/seasonal hazards such as north-eastern states face floods and western states like Gujarat and Rajasthan are drought prone. To provide water regularly, sufficient regional-level infrastructure projects are needed to support JJM.
• Habitation settlement pattern also varies from village to village, while some places have dense settlements others are diverse. The per capita cost varies accordingly and these patterns are to be addressed to provide FHTC to all households. 
• The presence of groundwater contaminants like arsenic, fluorides and other heavy metals poses another challenge for the JJM to provide adequate water quality.
• India has varied climatic conditions and water demand varies accordingly. To provide a round-the-year water supply, additional infrastructure developments are required.
• Getting the human resource to work at such speed and scale to meet the targets is yet another challenge for the effective implementation of JJM.
• Even during the pandemic the work on the JJM continued. 

JJM being a herculean task, all the states and UTs prioritised it, overcame the challenges and achieved a remarkable result of covering 12 crore households (about 61% of the rural households).  

JJM is linked to Public Health

Safe and readily available water is important for public health, whether it is used for drinking, domestic use, etc. Improved water supply and better management of water resources can boost countries’ economic growth and can contribute greatly to poverty reduction.

• JJM is resulting in significant socio-economic benefits to the rural population. Regular tap water supply relieves people, especially women and young girls, from carrying heavy bucket loads of water to meet their daily household needs thereby reducing the age-old drudgery. The time saved can be used for income generation activities, learning new skills and supporting children’s education.
• It is a matter of great satisfaction that today, there is no part of the country where people are forced to drink or cook with fluoride or arsenic-contaminated water. Either clean water through pipes is made available or while this is being done, in the interim, Community Water Purification Plants have come up to provide 8-10 litres per capita per day (lpcd) of water.
• There is a strong emphasis on providing clean water. Contaminated water is linked to the transmission of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, diarrhoea, typhoid, etc. and it mostly affects children. Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer has estimated that JJM will help save 1.36 lakh lives of children under the age of five every year.

Community Participation – 

In order to achieve long-term sustainability of the schemes, community participation from the very beginning has been at the heart of planning, implementation, operations and maintenance (O&M) of rural piped water supply schemes. 

• More than 5.24 lakh Village Water & Sanitation Committees (VWSC)/Pani Samitis have been constituted in the country and 5.12 lakh Village Action Plans (VAPs) have been prepared including the plans for drinking water source augmentation, greywater treatment and its reuse, and regular O&M of in-village water supply systems.

Water Quality Testing

To enable States/UTs to test water samples for water quality, and for sample collection, reporting, monitoring and surveillance of drinking water sources, an online JJM – Water Quality Management Information System (WQMIS) portal has been developed. The State–wise details of water quality tests reported through WQMIS are available in the public domain on the JJM dashboard.

• There are over 2,000 drinking water quality testing laboratories at different levels viz. State, district, sub-division and/or block level in the country. 
• To encourage water quality testing, to ensure a potable drinking water supply, States/UTs have opened water quality testing laboratories to the general public for testing of their water samples at a nominal rate.
• States/UTs have been advised to identify and train 5 persons preferably women from every village to conduct water quality testing using FTKs (Field Testing Kits)/bacteriological vials at the village level and report the same on the WQMIS portal. So far, over 20 lakh women have been trained.

Conclusion – With the active participation of people especially women, and rural communities working together, Jal Jeevan Mission has become a Jan Andolan. For long-term drinking water security, local communities and Gram Panchayats are coming forward and taking responsibility to manage village water supply systems, their water resources and grey water.  Jal Jeevan Mission is on track to fulfil the Government’s resolve to provide tap water supply to every rural household by 2024.

Read previous AIR Spotlight articles here.

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