State tops in providing tap water connections

Kolkata: Bengal has become the country's best state for consecutive two months in providing tap water connections to households under the Jal Swapna project. Following the directions of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the state Public Health Engineering department has expedited the work of ensuring tap water connections in every 2.5 crore household in the state.
In the month of September, the state PHE department has ensured connections in 2.37 lakh households, the highest among all states followed by Assam and Odisha that provided 1.95 lakh and 1.88 lakh connections respectively. Tamil Nadu has managed to provide 1.81 lakh connections. Other BJP run states including Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are much behind Bengal by providing connections to 96,067 and 79,358 households respectively.
In August, Bengal had topped by providing tap water connections to 2.38 lakh households, taking the total number of such beneficiaries in the state to nearly 20 lakh.
Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh were in seventh and eighth position in the month of August, dropping to ninth and 10th position respectively in September.
Out of the 2.37 lakh connections in September, Murshidabad district witnessed the maximum number of connections. It was 49,258 followed by East Burdwan with 24,028 connections. As many as 17,777 and 17,349 households in South 24-Parganas and Bankura have received new tap water connections.
Among North Bengal districts, Alipurduar has crossed the 10,000 mark in September while there were 7,362 connections provided in North Dinajpur apart from more than 5,000 connections each in Cooch Behar and Malda. There were around 2,362 connections in South Dinajpur.
This comes when the state PHE department has set a target of providing tap water connection to at least 1 crore households by the end of March 2022.
Pulak Roy, the state PHE minister, said: "We are working as per the guidance and direction of our Chief Minister. Her inspiration helped the entire team of the PHE department to achieve this feat."