Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity has endured over the years in part due to his focus on giving poorer Indians things like cooking gas, toilets and electricity. Now he wants every rural home to have water by the next national election in 2024.
The Rs 3.6 lakh crore program will put piped water in all of India’s 19.2 crore rural homes — more than all the houses in the US — over the next four years. That won’t be easy: Currently only 7 crore Indian households have piped water, or about 36% of the target.
“The mission is an acknowledgment that if we in India don’t fix our water availability this might become a limiting factor in our quest for faster socio-economic development,” Bharat Lal, who heads the Jal Jeevan Mission, a special division for piped and potable water in India’s Water Ministry, said in an interview in New Delhi. “Water is critical, the most important fundamental.”
Modi’s government has faced months of protests from farmers over a law they say will boost corporate influence over agriculture, a movement that has helped rally opposition forces who also accuse him of stoking sectarian tensions. Still, programs like the piped water plan help explain why the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has steadily consolidated power across the country since 2014.
Access to water is becoming a more urgent political issue: The government’s planning body projects demand will be twice the available supply by 2030, leading to shortages for hundreds of millions of people that will hurt economic growth. The 2018 report said India was “suffering from the worst water crisis in its history and millions of lives and livelihoods are under threat.”
Depleting Resource
Modi’s program aims to supply at least 55 liters of potable water to each person per day by building new pipelines and refurbishing existing networks, Lal said. It plans to use groundwater in areas of large river basins and set up desalination plants in coastal areas, he added.
Currently, India is the world’s biggest extractor of groundwater — more than China and the US combined — accounting for almost a quarter of the total extracted globally, according to Water Aid. Groundwater levels in the country declined by 61% between 2007 and 2017, the government told parliament in Nov. 2019 citing data from an irrigation census.
“The plan will work if India manages to simultaneously strengthen water sources,” said Romit Sen, associate director at the Montpelier, Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities. “We will need to fix the backend to ensure it doesn’t encourage exploitation.”
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