India has achieved a breakneck speed of installing “a tap per second” this year under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature Har Ghar Jal scheme to cover every household with potable tap water by 2024. In the first eight months of 2023, the country has already crossed record of all of last year.
The country saw a whopping 2.16 crore new tap connections being installed this year till August, compared to 2.08 crore in 2022. The performance this year under the scheme has translated to an average of 89,097 taps installed per day, which is more than “a tap per second”. In 2022, about 57,000 taps were installed daily on average.
India is also at the cusp of crossing the mark of a total of 13 crore tap connections in the next few days, marking a 68 % coverage. India started the scheme under the Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019 with just 17 % tap water coverage and the Prime Minister had fixed a target of five years to cover every house.
Leading the way in performance this year has been Uttar Pradesh, which alone has installed 90.12 lakh new tap connections out of the 2.16 crore in India. The state has also crossed the landmark figure of installing 1.5 crore new connections since the start of the mission in 2019.
Last year, UP had installed only 30.8 lakh new connections, raising concerns about whether India’s most populous state would be able to complete the mission in the time given as it had the largest unfinished job of providing 2.57 crore connections in 2019. But Uttar Pradesh has till now recorded 60 % coverage after chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s push and intervention, said officials.
Assam, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh have also made remarkable strides by surpassing the 55 % coverage mark by the end of August, according to a senior government official. However, the states of Rajasthan, Jharkhand, and West Bengal are struggling, with their coverage under the scheme standing at 43 %, 41 % and 38 % respectively so far. West Bengal still has 1.71 crore households without potable tap water connections and the state has only given 11 lakh connections this year. Five districts in West Bengal viz Purulia, Paschim Medinipur, Uttar Dinajpur, Darjeeling, and South 24 Parganas are, below 26 % coverage.
Source: http://ww.news18.com
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