 "drinking water")
Kerala is much behind the national average in providing fully functional tap water connections to rural households, Union Minister for Jal Shakti, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, said here on Wednesday.
The minister, after meeting Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and reviewing the progress made in the area with the officials, said the state needs "more pace, more synergy, and more spending" in the key sector to achieve the central government's ambitious target of providing clean drinking water for every household by 2024.
Addressing a press conference, Shekhawat said the pan-India average is more than 60 per cent and "we were able to provide more than 8.5 crore connections over the period of the last three years, but the state of Kerala is much behind the national average."
Kerala has so far provided tap water connections to around 47 per cent of households.
The minister said that though the total number of houses in the state is 70 lakhs, only 34.17 lakh houses have piped water connections.
He said Kerala joined the programme one year after it was launched and in the three years there is "tremendous progress but still, they have not reached 50 per cent marks."
The minister said all 70 lakhs households are to be connected with piped water, and the total worth of the projects that have to be completed is almost Rs 40,000 crores.
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Although the Centre made an allocation of Rs 9,000 crore in the last three years, the state could only spend Rs 6,400 crore, he noted.
"During the meeting, we have requested the state of Kerala through the Chief Minister and the officers that they need to further expedite, implementation and improve the pace of works and fund utilisation", Shekhawat said.
The Chief Minister and officials apprised him that land acquisition is a big problem and assured him that they will look into another model of acquisition to expedite the process.
He said states like Goa, Haryana, Gujarat, Telangana, Bihar, and Punjab have almost achieved 100 per cent tap water connection. Barring Jammu and Kashmir, all other Union Territories have also achieved 100 per cent status.
The Jal Jeevan Mission was announced by the Prime Minister on August 15, 2019 to provide every rural household with a tap water connection by 2024.
At the time of the launch of the mission in 2019, out of 19.35 crore rural households, only 3.23 Crore (16.72 per cent) had access to tap water.
As on date, within a short span of about three years since the life-changing mission, over 60 per cent of rural households have tap water supply in their homes, Shekhawat said.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
