India achieves UN Millennium Goal for drinking water

India has achieved the Millennium Development Goal for drinking water by providing 84 per cent of its rural population with access to improved sources of water, Rural Development Minister C P Joshi today said here.

However, the country is facing a tremendous challenge in sustaining drinking water security in rural areas as most water sources are ground water based and have been overexploited for agriculture and industry besides being subjected to untreated sewage, he said.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organisations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015.

"India has achieved considerable progress in providing clean and safe drinking water in most rural areas of the country. I am happy to say that we have achieved the MDG for drinking water...However, there is much to achieve. Our goal is to provide every household with an improved source of drinking water by 2012," Joshi said addressing the 4th International Learning Exchange programme on water, sanitation and hygiene organised by the UNICEF here.

Joshi said over exploitation of ground water sources is posing a 'growing' threat to the country's drinking water security. "We are, therefore, moving away from exclusive dependence on groundwater to reviving traditional water bodies and to the practice of collecting rain water, practices that were neglected when the handpump revolution came up."

There have also been 'heartening' examples of community ground water monitoring and crop water budgeting in Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, "models of which we hope to replicate on a larger scale to avoid over-drawing the ground water resources," he said.

Listing the other challenges, Joshi said government has to meet the increasing demand from rural areas to provide piped water and household tap connections.

"Only about 12 per cent of the rural households had tap connections in 2005. Our goal is to move up the water ladder from hand pumps to piped water supply through public taps and then to household tap connections culminating in continuous metered supply of safe water," he said.

The government is also working to ensure an open defecation free rural India by 2012 through the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), he said, adding the campaign has so far seen an increase in sanitation coverage.

"Between 2000 to 2008, 104 million people adopted improved sanitation in India of which 71 million were from rural India," he said, adding the total number of those opting for improved sanitation in India in the last two decades were more than the 2008 population of UK, France and Germany combined.