A parliamentary committee has just praised Jammu and Kashmir for its progress under the Jal Jeevan Mission. The tap connections are real. The question the report does not answer is how many of them actually deliver water fit to drink.
On Monday, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs commended the Union Territory administration for extending rural drinking water coverage and asked the Centre to release funds so the remaining schemes can be finished. The praise is not undeserved. A region that began the mission with barely a third of its rural homes connected has laid pipe into villages that had never seen one. That is progress, and it should be acknowledged.
But a connection is not a supply, and a supply is not safe water. The mission’s own functionality surveys, conducted nationally, have found that while almost every certified village has taps, only about three households in four receive water in the quantity, quality and regularity the scheme promises. There is no reason to believe Jammu and Kashmir has escaped that gap. Anyone who has spent a summer in the districts knows the tap that runs for an hour at dawn, the tap that runs only when the electricity does, and the tap that has never run at all because the scheme was declared complete before the source was connected.
The source is the heart of the problem. Across Kashmir, springs that fed villages for generations are shrinking or drying as forests thin, glaciers retreat and rainfall turns erratic. A parliamentary panel warned in March that a substantial share of the taps installed under the mission nationally sit on sources that failed within a year or two. Laying pipe from a dying spring is not infrastructure. It is an announcement waiting to be exposed by the first dry season.
Quality is the other silence in the report. Srinagar and the towns along the Jhelum still draw water from a river and lakes that receive untreated sewage, and rural schemes routinely skip filtration altogether. The Valley’s periodic outbreaks of jaundice and diarrhoeal illness are not accidents of weather; they are the predictable result of water that was never tested before it reached the kitchen. Field testing kits exist in most panchayats. Results are rarely published, and fewer still are acted upon.
The revised mission now runs until 2028 with a far larger outlay, and its stated shift is from counting taps to guaranteeing service. Jammu and Kashmir should take that shift seriously rather than treat it as another target to declare met. That means notifying an operation and maintenance policy with real user committees and real budgets, so pipes do not rot the day the contractor leaves. It means mapping and protecting every spring the schemes depend on. And it means publishing water quality results, village by village, so that a family can know what is coming out of the tap before their children drink it.
Coverage figures make good headlines. Clean water in a glass makes a healthy community. The administration has earned praise for the first. It has yet to earn it for the second.
