Drinking Water at the Door-Step: Jal Jeevan Mission
The vision of Jal Jeevan Mission is not only to make water accessible to the people. It is also a massive decentralization movement. This is a village-driven and women-driven movement.
Water is the basis of life. No human activity is possible without water. Drinking water supply is, therefore, an essential and crucial component for the well-being of a community.
Challenges
Lack of water facilities to household especially rural.
From Independence till now, out of a total of 19.14 crore rural households, only 3.23 crore (17%) households were having tap water connections.
Thus, a whopping majority of 83% of rural households were devoid of any functional tap water connection.
In the absence of access to potable drinking water at home, families, especially women and young girls are forced to spend lots of time and energy every day fetching water for their families which raises their vulnerability.
Jal Jeevan Mission
The core objective of Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) is to improve the lives of people, especially women and children, by ensuring clean tap water supply to every rural household and public institutions in villages by 2024.
In a short span of just 37 months, over seven crore rural households have been provided with tap water connections under JJM.
Further, three States – Goa, Telangana and Haryana and three UTs – A&N Islands, D&N Haveli & Daman & Diu and Puducherry have become ‘Har Ghar Jal’.
Jal Jeevan Mission is making concerted efforts to free women from the age-old drudgery of fetching water from a distance carrying heavy loads and to make the villages – WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) - enlightened villages.
By involving women in the planning, decision-making, implementation and monitoring of JJM, the mission is playing an important role in women’s empowerment.
