The BJP in its manifesto for the general elections has announced that, if elected back to power, it would launch a ‘Jal Jivan Mission’, under which it will introduce a special programme, ‘Nal se Jal’, to ensure piped water for every household by 2024.
Data from the Union government shows, in the last five years of the NDA government, the highest number of piped water connections provided in a single year was 3.6 million. In order to meet the target, the BJP has promised in its 2019 manifesto that the Union government would have to provide more than 36.5 million connections on an average in a year. At the moment, only 32.57 million (18.24 per cent) of the 178.54 million households have piped water connections.
In its manifesto for the 2014 elections, the BJP had promised that the government would “facilitate piped water to all households”.
While in 2014, the Congress had made a similar promise, in 2019 it has just said, “The allocation to the National Drinking Water Mission that has suffered neglect under the BJP government will be increased.”
Since 2009, different governments have attempted to provide drinking water to people through the National Drinking Water Mission, launched in 2009 and revised in 2012. Coming into power in 2014, the NDA government continued with the scheme, though it made substantial alterations in 2015. The alteration came along with a 60 per cent reduction in the fund allocation for rural drinking water over its peak year funding in 2012-13, when Rs 10,489 crore was spent on the scheme.
In comparison, in 2015-16, the government spent only Rs 4,369 crore on supplying drinking water to rural habitations. The NDA government began marginal improvement in funding support for the next two years by 37 per cent and 18 per cent over previous years, but in the last financial year, funding support to drinking water supply dried up again, reducing by 22 per cent. The revised expenditure of the Union government on providing drinking water supply came down to Rs 5,500 crore.
This downward trend looks bleaker when one compares these numbers to the size of the overall budget.
Shifting entirely to piped water would require leapfrogging in terms of capacity, investment and design of the programme.