Uttar Pradesh: 11 lakh families got piped water supply in 4 years

LUCKNOW: Highlighting the success it has achieved in the implementation of the piped water scheme under Namami Gange and the rural drinking water supply department, the UP government has said that it has managed to provide tap water to almost 11 lakh families in the past four years.
Principal secretary (Namami Gange) Anurag Srivastava said clean drinking water has been made available to 10,89,844 houses spread across 5,000 villages in 65 districts.
Srivastava said nearly 11 lakh households included 92,358 in Muzaffarnagar, 78,657 in Kushinagar, 14,553 in Kannauj, 45,363 in Gorakhpur and 32,865 in Deoria which have started receiving pure drinking water. “The state government spent Rs 1,033 crore on this project in 2017-18, Rs 1,192 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 1,058 crore in 2019-20. The department is in the last stages of finalising the plan to connect thousands of villages of Bundelkhand and Vindhya with water supply from December. Projects under Jal Jivan Mission are being rolled out and water should be available in these regions within three months,” Srivastava said.
He said the goal of the government is to supply pure drinking water to every household in rural areas and to achieve that target, departments were working at a fast pace. An official at Jal Jivan Mission said the government’s focus in prioritising supply was on districts where clean drinking water was not available in rural areas and disease were being reported as a result of contaminated water.
“Not only are new schemes being implemented but the government is renewing old schemes which had been left incomplete under previous governments. As part of that, old infrastructure is being repaired and refurbished, older channels are being de-silted and re-boring of tubewells is being done. In the next few days, we will be able to connect the villages of Bundelkhand and Vindhya regions with water supply,” the official said.
He said new water treatment plants were also under construction where water from nearby dams would be supplied to villages in Bundelkhand.