Empty taps but 95% coverage under piped water scheme in Uttarakhand villages
Connecting infrastructure has not been completed in many places while caste and religious discrimination has also hindered access to water supply.
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Basanti Devi sits in her courtyard, surrounded by plastic containers, most of them empty. She points to a tap, held together by scraps of cloth and polythene bags: “One day, I was so angry at the uselessness of this tap that I just ripped it apart; my children later fixed it,” she says. With no running water, Basanti’s family relies on a naula, a traditional aquifer, located deep inside the nearby forest. She spends an hour a day walking narrow trails to fetch 10 litres of water.
Devi’s tap in Bughadh village, Almora district, in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, was provided under the Har Ghar Jal scheme, literally “water for every home”. Launched in 2019, this government programme had the ambitious goal of providing piped water to every rural household in India by 2024. Unfortunately, cases like Devi’s highlight the difference between aspiration and reality.
Misleading data
On paper the project seems very successful. According to the government website only 130,325 households in Uttarakhand, less than 9%, had a tap water connection in August 2019. By July 2023 the government figures reported that 78.40% households in Uttarakhand had tap water connections and by July 2024 the proportion was over 95%.
The official figures of the Ministry of Jal Shakti are based...
