Indicative of the considerable challenges it faces in executing the ambitious Jal Jeevan Mission – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious promise to provide potable tap water to all rural households by 2024 – Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech on Saturday said that the scheme would now be completed by 2028.
Read the Union Budget 2025 Highlights
While announcing an “enhanced outlay” but without specifying an amount, she underlined that the mission’s focus would be on the quality of infrastructure, operation and management of rural piped water supply schemes through “jan bhagidhari” or people’s participation. Separate agreement would be signed with States/UTs, to ensure sustainability and citizen-centric water service delivery, she added.
Also Read | Union Budget 2025: Centre to focus on increasing women’s financial empowerment
So far 80% of rural households had a piped water connection, up from the 15% in 2019. To this end, the government has spent ₹3.6 lakh crore since 2019. A perusal of the Budget documents shows that the nodal Jal Shakti Ministry expects to spend ₹67,000 crore in 2025-26. This is a little less than the ₹69,992 crore it actually spent in 2023-24. In 2024-25, the ministry provisioned to spend ₹70,000 crore from March ‘24 to March ‘25, but, as of February, expects to spend only ₹22,694 crore – suggesting an inability to spend nearly ₹50,000 crore despite having the funds for it.
A person privy to the workings of the Jal Jeevan Mission, requesting anonymity, explained to The Hindu that the scheme was targeted as first achieving “low hanging fruit’’ that is ensuring water supply to places that had most of the infrastructure in place but were lacking last-mile connectivity. This approach pushed coverage up to 50%. Following this, increasing coverage of households became tougher as implementing connecting infrastructure – in several cases requiring water from reservoirs to be siphoned to distant villages – became more challenging, the person explained.
Another challenge emerged during COVID-19 and the Russian-Ukraine war, which led to a a hike in the prices of necessary equipment. “When the scheme was envisioned, the outlay was nearly ₹7 lakh crore, with half to be borne by States. Now we require nearly ₹4 lakh crore to complete the scheme,” the person said.
This means the Jal Shakti Ministry requires nearly as much as it used from 2019-2024 to complete the remaining 20%. The slackening in coverage has been evident for a while. In July 2023, when the coverage was 63%, The Hindu had reported that the scheme was unlikely to meet its stated 100% coverage target by 2024. In June ‘24, about 77% households had been covered.
These percentage numbers that are reported are based on estimations by States. An independent process, whereby villages certify that they are indeed getting the water promised, has shown that only about half of the households reportedly certified have confirmed this so.
Published - February 01, 2025 12:12 pm IST
