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The Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM)- a flagship program launched by the Government of India aims at ensuring safe, adequate and continuous drinking water through individual household tap connections (Har Ghar Jal) by 2024.
The mission aims to provide potable drinking water and prevent deaths and illness due to poor quality water, eliminate drudgery of women in accessing drinking water, and improve the livelihoods of people living in rural areas. The programme places emphasis on sufficient, reliable, and regular supply of drinking water through household tap connections rather than simple creation of infrastructure.
The programme also focuses on decentralised governance for monitoring program uptake at the state (State Water And Sanitation Mission), district (District Water and Sanitation Mission) and village level (Village Water And Sanitation Committee) with a greater community engagement and focuses on addressing health issues, education among girls, women’s participation in the labour market, and generation of livelihood opportunities in various phases of its implementation by focusing on inclusivity and equity in its coverage.
The programme has achieved a paradigm shift from 16 percent coverage in 2019 to 76.80 percent as of June, 2024 in providing safe drinking water at the household level informs this paper titled 'Rural drinking water supply program and societal development: Evidence from the early implementation phase of India’s Jal Jeevan Mission' in PLOS One.
The Government of India has come up with a platform to monitor the coverage of JJM (the IMIS database). While time-to-time evaluation of JJM is crucial for policymakers to monitor the progress in the early stages, there are hardly any program evaluation studies that have assessed the impacts of previously existing rural drinking water supply schemes in India and the intermediate effects of JJM on water access in India.
The paper discusses the findings of a study that aims at evaluating the intermediate effects of JJM on the burden of drinking water collection on women, female children and the duration of water collection using nationally representative sample survey data.
State level implementation of the JJM
Although JJM is a national program, the states and union territories have autonomy to implement the program based on their State Action Plans (SAP) with timelines for 100 percent coverage. Launched in August 2019, the programme started its implementation process by 2020 through batchwise implementation of schemes covering villages in each district.
The program aims to create water supply infrastructure in two categories -creation of in-village infrastructure under the single village scheme (includes source development/ augmentation/ grey water management) or the creation of infrastructure for bulk transfer of water or multi village scheme (includes treatment and distribution system).
Creation of infrastructure includes the following three phases:
Planning and mobilisation phase
Includes identification of village by DWSM (District Water and Sanitation Mission) and approval of estimate for implementation of in village infrastructure for 3–6 months by the DWSM.
Implementation phase
The implementation phase takes about 6–12 months of time and includes the ground level initiation of construction based on the scheme identified.
Post implementation phase
The post implementation phase starts after the development of water supply infrastructure for 3–4 months that ensures water supply to households, operation and management, water tariff collection and capacity building.
Around 13.39 percent of villages have been identified as ‘Har Ghar Jal (HGJ) reported’ (villages which are reported to be operational and yet to be approved by Gram Panchayat) in 2020 with this number increasing to 22.15 percent in 2021.
Early impacts of JJM on access to drinking water
This study assesses the early/intermediate effects of JJM in terms of access to drinking water from two different time periods: 2015–16 and 2019–21 and looks at nationally representative sample survey data from round 4 (2015–16) and round 5 (2019–21) of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS).
The study uses four variables covering different aspects of access to drinking water: i) households with tap water connections in the premises, ii) adult women (age 15 to 49) in the household fetching drinking water from distant sources, iii) female children (up to age 15) in the household fetching drinking water from distant sources and iv) time elapsed in fetching water from distant sources. To estimate the program effect, the variable ‘households with tap water connections in the premises’ was used as a proxy for JJM intervention.
What does the study find?
Access to drinking water differs by states
The proportion of households with tap water connections have increased from 18.33 percent in 2015–16 to 21.62 percent in 2019–21 at the national level. This increase is more pronounced in the north-eastern states (from 32.22 percent in 2015–16 to 47.72 percent in 2019–21) followed by high-focus EAG states (12.41 percent in 2015–16 to 17.11 percent in 2019–21).
An increase in household level tap water connection can be seen for most states except some like Goa, Gujarat, Assam, Nagaland, and Sikkim, where data shows that the proportion of rural households with tap water connection have declined over time.
Burden of fetching water among women and girls has declined
The proportion of adult women fetching drinking water has declined at the national level from 82.25 percent in 2015–16 to 75.89 percent in 2019–21. This decline is mostly among low focus states (77.77 percent in 2015–16 to 59.11 percent in 2019–21), followed by the high focus EAG states (86.13 in 2015–16 to 83.43 percent in 2019–21). A similar pattern of decline is seen for majority of states except Bihar, Goa, Meghalaya, and Sikkim.
The proportion of female children fetching drinking water from distant sources has marginally decreased at the national level from 2.82 percent in 2015–16 to 2.81 percent in 2019–21. This is mostly in low focus states (2.19 percent in 2015–16 to 1.39 percent in 2019–21) followed by high focus states (3.43 percent in 2015–16 to 3.13 percent in 2019–21). The same pattern of decline is also observed at individual state level except for states like Tripura, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and West Bengal.
Time needed by women to fetch water shows a decline
The time taken to fetch drinking water has declined significantly at the national and majority of state levels except for selected north-eastern states. The proportion of households taking more than 30 minutes of time to fetch water has reduced from 6.75 percent in 2015–16 to 4.87 percent in 2019–21 at the national level. This is mostly among high-focus EAG and low-focus states.
However, the proportion of households taking more than 30 minutes to fetch drinking water has increased from 3.75 percent in 2015–16 to 4.88 percent in 2019–21 among north-eastern states. A significant reduction in time required to fetch drinking water is observed for all states except Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, and some north-eastern states such as Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura.
Access to household tap connections
The probability of having a household tap connection is found to be significantly high among wealthy households, both in the pre-JJM and early-JJM periods, while the probability of water being collected by women and female children and time taken to fetch water is significantly higher among the disadvantaged/poor households in both pre- and early-JJM period.
Among the households who have tap water connections, the households with no education have a significantly higher probability of owning a tap water connection compared to the households with some education. Similarly poor education is associated with a higher probability of water being fetched by women and female children and longer time taken to fetch water.
Households belonging to SC category have a higher probability of having household tap connections compared to the ST, OBC and other castes. A significant proportion of households belonging to the SC caste also have a higher probability of women fetching water in their households compared to the other caste categories.
The probability of having a household tap connection significantly declines with the increase in household size. However, the probability of women and female children fetching water and a longer duration of time taken to fetch water are found to increase with larger household size.
The study finds that the coverage of household tap connections is inequitable and favours wealthy households. The daily grind of fetching water from long distances among women is high among marginalised communities, especially the SC category and households with no education. At the same time, the study shows a favourable distribution of household tap connections among marginalised communities, especially the SC category and households with no education.
This indicates that simple facilitation of tap water at doorstep does not encourage the consumption of water from it. Dependence of people on local sources of drinking water could be because of issues like the taste and potability of drinking water, reliability of local sources, lack of awareness and lack of education.
Despite the fact that overall proportion of households in which burden of water fetching on female children and duration of water fetching has reduced, the results do not seem to attribute this JJM coverage, argues the paper.
The paper highlights the following learnings from the analysis for policy makers:
Mere creation of tap connections does not ensure regular flow of potable and assured drinking water as several factors cause delay in the completion of projects in villages. Thus, community involvement from the initial stages of the intervention to ensure progress through regular flow of potable water to people is important. At the same time, community awareness on water utility development is crucial.
Steps such as collecting community contributions based on the ability to pay can be undertaken taking into consideration the pro rich bias in tap water connections, as maintaining socioeconomic equity in its implementation stage will be crucial to ensure long-run sustainability of the programme.