In 7 years, wells in 1.5 lakh villages ran dry: CAG report

A CAG report tabled in Parliament on Friday said there were only 11.84 lakh villages getting water supply under the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Dec 21, 2008, 23:33:32 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Urban India might be relishing the fruits of India’s growing economy, but rural India continues to suffer even on basic amenities. For the past seven years, 1.54 lakh Indian villages have lost access to water supply. The reason: depleting underground water level.

A Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report tabled in Parliament on Friday said there were only 11.84 lakh villages getting water supply under the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme. About Rs 66,000 crore has been spent since 1950 on the programme. In 2007, the number had fallen to 10.30 lakh. Almost all these villages were getting water through tube-wells.

Most states told the CAG that the “alarming level” of slippage was due to excessive withdrawal of ground water, inadequate maintenance of tube-wells and lack of sustaining of water resources.

The report, while highlighting that 85 per cent of rural India is dependent on ground water, said environmental degradation and poor recharge are making most underground sources “defunct”. It said substantial slip-backs were revealed in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

The Centre’s initiative to make it mandatory for people to recharge underground water has remained unimplemented. As many as 19 states have failed to implement its model law to recharge under ground water, the report said.

About 14 states have failed to conduct periodical assessment of underground water situation on a scientific basis. Twenty states have not made ground water re-charge a mandatory requirement, the report said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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