Team News Riveting
Morning hours are time for gratitude for Munni Devi, a resident of Kolar village in Umariya district of Madhya Pradesh.
Her morning hours are busy like any other village woman, but she is very particular with her divine routine. The deck is ready for prayers, and soon her tiny house is filled with the fragrance of incense, and fresh flowers, and as Munni Bai puts tilak on the ‘tap’, her head bows with thankfulness and devotion.
The well decked tap is no less than a God’s idol to her as it brings water from the holy river ‘Son’, which is like little Ganga for her. Earlier she used to travel 150 Kilometres to Amarkantak (origin of the river) in a year or two for religious rituals but now the same river water post treatment is supplied to her through household tap connection.
The Jal Jeevan Mission implemented by the Ministry of Jal Shakti in partnership with States aims to provide adequate drinking water of prescribed quality on regular and long-term basis to every rural household in the country by 2024. In a bid to provide adequate drinking water to all rural households in the State, the Centre has allocated Rs 1,280 crore for the implementation of Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) in Madhya Pradesh in 2020-21.
Out of 1.21 crore rural households in the State, 13.52 lakh have provided tap connections, while the State government plans to provide tap water connections to 26.7 lakh homes in 2020-21. So far, 5.5 lakh tap connections have been provided.
Munni Bai’s Kolar village has 271 households, mostly tribals. Agriculture and animal husbandry are main sources of livelihood in the village. The village has one Primary School and one Aaganwadi centre. Earlier, the main source of drinking water for the villagers was a tube well and hand pumps, which usually went dry in summer season compounding the water woes of the villagers.
“Before this tap connection I had to bring water from a nearby well and during summer season I used to walk 1-2 kms in the scorching heat to fetch drinking water,” says Munni Bai. The harsh summers and paucity of water has been one of the detriments of mass exodus from rural and tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh.
The absence of tap connections affected the lives of many women and girls in the area, thereby, resulting in poor quality of life and higher dropout rate of girls in the schools. Water scarcity at times was so grave that it compelled the villagers to resort to open defecation, as enough water was not available.
