5 crore households provided with water connection since Jal Jeevan scheme launch: PM

He also asserted that today’s India has done more work on this front in just two years than what was done in seven decades.

Speaking after interacting with gram panchayats and village water and sanitation committees (VWSC) on the Jal Jeevan Mission, Modi said the mission was village-driven and its vision was not just to make water accessible to the people, but it was also a big movement of decentralisation. In an apparent dig at previous Congress dispensations, Modi said those who had the responsibility of policy-making for a long time lived in abundance of water.

The Prime Minister asserted that the vision of Jal Jeevan Mission is a village-driven and women-driven movement, and its main base is mass movement and public participation. Referring to popular conceptions of the problem of water, the prime minister talked of movies, stories, poems that told in detail how the women and children of the village walked miles to fetch water.

Pointing out that from the time of independence till 2019, only three crore households in the country had access to tap water, he said since the launch of Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019, five crore households have been connected with water connections. “Today, water is reaching every household in about 1.25 lakh villages in about 80 districts of the country. In the aspirational districts the number of tap connections have increased from 31 lakh to 1.16 crore,” he said, asserting that in just two years, more work has been done than was done in the last seven decades.

He appealed to every citizen of the country who lives in an abundance of water, to make more efforts to save water, and called upon them to change their habits too.