Government data shows that India will have a record 3.15 million rupees of piped water connections by 2023, installed at a rate of exactly “one tap per second”. Uttar Pradesh alone contributed to 40% of these new connections, with the state achieving the full financial year target in just nine months.

The pace of the ‘Har Ghar Jal’ scheme has accelerated significantly in 2023 compared to 2022, when piped water connections of Rs 2.08 crore were achieved. As a result, this number will increase by almost 51% by 2023, suggesting that if the pace is further accelerated, the mission is on track to achieve 100% tap water saturation by the end of 2024. Data shows that as of now, around 50 million households in the country still have piped water connections.

“The largest contributor of Functional Household Tap Connections (FHTC) is Uttar Pradesh with over 1.27 billion FHTC installed and an average of nearly 35,000 tap connections per day. Thus, more than every 5 FHTC reported in the country in 2023 2 are in Uttar Pradesh. Encouragingly, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have achieved their respective annual action plans (2023-24),” a government report said.

challenge

West Bengal, Jharkhand and Rajasthan remain huge challenges in completing the mission. So far, all three states have less than 50% piped water connection coverage, but the national average is nearly 74%. West Bengal is the most backward state with a coverage rate of only 42% and more than 10 million households without piped water connections. In 2023, West Bengal added only 20 lakh water connections, while Uttar Pradesh added 1.27 lakh.

The latest data shows that of the 50 million households without piped water, 190 million are in the three states of West Bengal, Rajasthan and Jharkhand.