Jal Jeevan Mission: Maharashtra presents annual action plan for FY22

Maharashtra presented its Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) annual action plan through a video conference with details of the plan for FY22 as well as a saturation plan for the state to provide tap water connection to every rural household. The annual action plan emphasises on drinking water source strengthening and augmentation of water supply works to provide household tap connections, greywater treatment and reuse, and operation and maintenance, various support activities including IEC plan, training of stakeholders, community mobilisation, water quality surveillance and monitoring, strengthening of water testing laboratories and their NABL accreditation, among others. In FY22, Maharashtra plans to provide 27.45 lakh tap connections and is also planning the skill training of 42,000 personnel. Currently, the state has around 1.42 crore rural households, of which around 91 lakh (64%) households have access to tap water supply. In 2020-21, Maharashtra provided 37.15 lakh tap water connections in rural areas. It has proposed to make 13 districts, 131 blocks, and 12,839 villages, ‘Har Ghar Jal’—aimed at 100% coverage. In 2020-21, Rs 1,828.92 crore central fund was allocated to the state to provide assured tap water supply, out of which the state could draw only Rs 457 crore. Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, the local community is being encouraged for surveillance of water quality. The Public Health Engineering (PHE) department is facilitating to empower and engage with the community. For this, an action plan is being carried out to incorporate activities like timely procurement and supply of field test kits to the community, identification of at least five women in every village for community engagement, training women on how to use the field test kits and reporting the test result findings. The state has undertaken 100% chemical tests of water sources and delivery points as planned in 2020-21. JJM is a flagship programme of the central government, which aims to provide tap water connection to every rural household in 2020-21. In 2021-22, in addition to the Rs 50,011 crore budgetary allocation for JJM, there is also Rs 26,940 crore assured fund available under the 15th Finance Commission tied-grant to rural local bodies (RLBs) and Panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) for water and sanitation, matching state share and externally aided as well as state-funded projects. Image Source Also read: Jal Jeevan Mission: Govt deploys sensor-based IoT devices Also read: BMC to wind up 24-hr water supply project Also read: India reaches piped water to 35 million village homes