‘Legislation to curb misuse of water under JJM in pipeline’
‘Our aim is to supply potable drinking water to all rural households in state by 2025’
State Public Health Engineering (PHE) minister Pulak Roy on Wednesday indicated at bringing a legislature to curb the practice of using drinking water supplied to rural households under the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) project for other purposes.
“Our aim is to supply potable drinking water to every single rural household in the state by 2025 as directed by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. There are departments like Irrigation and Waterways, Water Resources Investigation that look after the supply of water for agriculture.
We want to ensure that drinking water is strictly used for drinking purposes so we are planning to come up with legislation to curb the practice of using drinking water for other purposes,” Roy said in response to a query on misuse of drinking water at the state Assembly.
According to sources, in the recent past, the department has received several complaints of using the water supplied to households under Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) at hotels, restaurants, industrial units and factories, etc.
As per estimates by the PHE department, the JJM project in Bengal will cover 1.73 crore households.
“We have already reached out to over 64.74 crore households which is 37.34 per cent of the populace to be covered,” added Roy.
In 2022-23, the state expenditure under the scheme was to the tune of Rs 3,276.79 crore while the Central share was Rs 2,070.51 crore. Till date, the total expenditure for supply of tap water to households has been Rs 12,901.46 crore. The project had kicked off from July 2020.
The share of the Centre and state in the project is 50:50. However, the state has to incur extra cost for purchasing land for the project besides establishment cost which effectively results in the state spending 65 per cent of the total
project cost.
