The Prime Minister in the Independence Day speech announced the Jal Jeevan Mission, which plans to supply water to all households by 2024. It will be a decentralised, community-managed and sustainable water management scheme.

Body:

Objectives:

• This Mission will focus on integrated demand and supply side management of water at the local level, including creation of local infrastructure for source sustainability like rainwater harvesting, groundwater recharge and management of household wastewater for reuse in agriculture.
• The Mission will converge with other Central and State Government Schemes to achieve its objectives of sustainable water supply management across the country.

Current Scenario of water supply in rural areas:

• For many years, the central and state governments have been making efforts to increase access to safe and adequate drinking water.
• The provision of a basic quantity of drinking water in rural India has been achieved through hand pumps, dug wells, household water supply (HWS), etc.
• Thus, while states like Sikkim managed to achieve high levels of HWS, a relatively low percentage of rural Indian households have access to this.

Challenges faced:

• In rural drinking water service delivery, there is inadequate attention given to taking measures to sustain the source of the water, in most cases groundwater is a challenge.
• This proposed mission will make source sustainability measures mandatory prior to pumping and distributing water to households.
• Another issue with the traditional approach to service delivery was that the provision of drinking water was viewed primarily as an engineering solution, with schemes being planned and executed by the public health and engineering departments.
• However, water is an ideal sector for the applicability of the principle of subsidiarity, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.

Jal Jeevan mission – a solution:

• With adequate capacity building and training, water can be most efficiently managed at the lowest appropriate level.
• Adopting this principle, the Jal Jeevan Mission’s first preference will be to have community-managed single village ground water-based schemes, wherever sufficient quantity and good quality of groundwater exists.
• Wherever adequate quantity of safe groundwater is not present, or where it may be technically not feasible to have single-village schemes, surface water-based multi-village schemes will be promoted.
• Further, in some remote regions, where it may not be techno-economically feasible to have household water supply schemes, local innovations, such as solar-based schemes will be encouraged.
• It is not commonly known that household waste water from HWS amounts to about 75% of the amount of water supplied.
• With the rural households to get HWS under the proposed mission, huge quantities of household waste water will be generated across the country, therefore making its effective management critical.
• There is a plan to include a mandatory provision under the mission for the effective channelling and treatment of household waste water, through appropriate and low cost drainage and treatment systems.
• Once appropriately treated, this waste water can be used for both recharge of groundwater as well as for irrigation purposes.

Way forward:

• An extensive information, education and communication will be needed to create a people’s movement for water management.
• The ongoing Jal Shakti Abhiyan will help in creating awareness about the importance of integrating source sustainability and water reuse.
• This integrated approach to decentralised, community managed, and sustainable water management is the backbone of the government’s plan to ensure that every household gets the benefits of water supply.

Conclusion:

The Jal Jeevan Mission will be a major step towards improving our people’s ease of living and meeting their aspirations of a New India.