Dark side of emerging India: 50% Bharat walks 5km a day for water

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey of as many as 95,000 households also found that the average time to fetch drinking water in rural India was 35 minutes while it was 31 minutes in the urban areas.

Updated on: Dec 26, 2013, 08:58:44 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Showing the dark side of emerging India, a new government surveys shows that half of the women in rural India have to walk up to 5km every day to fetch potable water.

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey of as many as 95,000 households also found that the average time to fetch drinking water in rural India was 35 minutes while it was 31 minutes in the urban areas. Half of this time gets lost in a queue waiting for one’s turn.

The survey said in 2012, 85.8% of households in the rural India and 89.6% of households in the urban India got sufficient water as compared to 86.2% and 91.1% households respectively in 2008-09.

“In rural areas, Uttar Pradesh (97.1%) supplied the highest while Jharkhand (70.3%) the lowest sufficient drinking water. In the urban areas, UP had the highest proportion (96.6%) and Madhya Pradesh the lowest (76.2%) proportion,” the survey found.

The survey revealed that in 2012, 46.1% of households in the rural India got drinking water facility at home as compared to 76.8% in the urban areas. It is a 5% increase since 2008.

In rural areas, Punjab had the highest proportion of homes having drinking water facility while Chhattisgarh was at the bottom. Similarly, in the urban areas, Himachal Pradesh had the highest proportion of homes having drinking facility at homes and West Bengal was at the bottom of the list.

The remaining households had to travel up to 5 km a day to fetch their daily requirement of drinking water. However, the number of households having to travel between 2 to 5 km has increased between 2008-09 and 2012, the survey found.

The survey showed that considerably high waiting time —more than 20 minutes — to fetch water in prosperous places like Delhi, Chandigarh and Gujarat. However, the highest waiting time to get water was 24 minutes in Rajasthan and lowest of three minutes in Manipur.

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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