Jalmani to provide 3,000 HP schools with water filters

School children in at least 3,000 primary schools of Himachal Pradesh will get filtered water by the end of this year. This was announced by Ravinder Singh Ravi, state irrigation and public health (IPH) minister here.

He said under the ‘jalmani’ scheme, the selected schools will be provided Terafil filters.

The minister said 1,650 panchayats had already been provided with field test kits (FTK) for checking the water quality. The remaining panchayats will be provided with FTKs by the end of this year.

The government has provided Rs 4,00,000 each to district water and sanitation committees for the upgradation of 17 water quality labs in the state.

Money has also been provided for setting up 12 sub-divisional labs in the state.

Over Rs 20 crore grant has been provided by the Central government to the national rural drinking water supply programme (NRDWP) of which Rs 4.7 crore was spent in the last year.

The minister claimed there were 53,205 habitations in the state, out of which 41,418 have already been provided with drinking water facilities.