NATIONAL RURAL DRINKING WATER PROGRAMME: AN OVERVIEW

Abstract

In these 60 years of independence, Indian government investment in rural water supply and sanitation had been supply driven and top down. But poor operation and maintenance (O&M) was causing a number of water supply systems to fail, and water was seen by rural communities not as a scarce socioeconomic resource requiring local management, but as a social right to be provided free of cost by the government. A comprehensive review of water resource management in India concluded that ‘India faces an increasingly crucial situation; its limited water resources are stressed and depleting while its demands are growing rapidly in different sectors’, and that ‘replacement costs of water supply hardware are decreasing several times in the available budget’.

National Rural Drinking Water Programme was introduced in the year 2009 as a Centrally sponsored scheme that provides financial and technical assistance to the State Governments for providing safe drinking water to rural inhabitants. It serves to provide safe and adequate drinking water for drinking, cooking and other domestic needs to every rural person on a sustainable basis. Recently, the Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, approved the continuation and restructuring of the initiative to make it outcome-based, competitive and better monitored by laying focus on sustainability of schemes to ensure good quality service delivery to the rural populous. This article provides in-depth coverage of the scheme based on the various Annual reports and Audit reports Government of India and other agencies.