State aims water supply to 7L households this fiscal

Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 18

With exhaustive and aggressive micro and macro planning to install taps in every rural household under the Jal Jeevan Mission, Haryana has set a target of taking drinking water to seven lakh households during this financial year and has planned to complete the entire exercise by 2022, two years ahead of the national target date.

The Public Health Department has divided the state into three categories to kickstart its work in a phased manner. “We have divided all villages into slots based on water availability and network. In the first category, we plan to target areas where water is available, but distribution pipelines need to be laid. In the second category, we will tackle areas where supply needs to be augmented. The third category has villages where water sources need to be changed. This is the toughest category and we will tackle it last so that water can at least start to flow in houses where it is available,” explains Devender Singh, Additional Chief Secretary, Public Health.

Out of 30 lakh rural households in the state, it was found that water supply to only 11 lakh households was being billed as per the BISWAS portal at the time of the launch of the programme in December last. Since then, about 11 lakh households had been added to the portal, including four lakh in 2020-21. Since the target for this year is seven lakh households, work is in progress to take water to the remaining households. While ensuring quality, the department has to meet a supply target of 55 litres per capita per day.

The department has created a system whereby it has set deadlines for every habitation. The timeline lays down six critical dates — that of submission of tender, technical sanction, floating of tender, its award, start of work and its finishing. “We have mapped every single habitation. This will help us identify where we are lagging in case there is a delay. We have been approached by Punjab and Maharashtra for counselling them about our work plan,” Devender Singh said.

The last one lakh households, primarily in villages of Nuh, set for the last year, will be the most difficult since water is in short supply, underground water is brackish and no canal network carrying requisite quality of drinking water is available. Those households will be tackled last and the state has worked out a plan by which all households in the state will have a tap connection supplying water by the end of 2022.

“We have created a web-enabled dashboard which can give data and provide dynamic real-time progress of each habitation. This not only ensures transparency in the work being carried out on the ground, but also allows us to monitor the progress in every habitation of each village in each district,” Devender Singh explained. At the end of this financial year, one district and 2,898 villages would have tap connections in all rural households, he added.

Division into three slots

• In the first category, areas where water distribution pipeline needs to be laid will be the target
• In the second category, areas where supply of water needs to be augmented will be tackled
• The third category has villages where sources need to be changed, which will be tackled last