But in a couple of years, the liquid in the tap turned turbid.

“The water quality and pressure in the tap were adequate initially. But then the water became muddy and smelly. We had to move to a submersible pump. We have not been using the tap for two years now,” Ram Prakash (not his real name) told The Secretariat. The pump now draws out precious groundwater and sends it to an RO system.

His story, in a nutshell, is all that went wrong with the Jal Jeevan Mission - one of the largest rural infrastructure programmes in the world. The Mission began in 2019 with the aim of taking safe, adequate, and piped drinking water to every village household in India by 2024.

But in March this year, the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the deadline for its completion to 2028, saying it would be “re-oriented” from infrastructure creation to service delivery.

C.R. Patil, the Union Minister for Jal Shakti, puts it simply. “There is a water connection in every house, there is a tap, but there is no water,” he told The Secretariat. He, however, added a caveat: “Water is a state subject.”

The Jal Jeevan Mission has now entered a difficult new phase - one that pipelines, construction, and tap installation alone cannot solve. Experts say the government needs to focus on auditing water quality and delivery systems.

B.N. Navalawala, Former Secretary to the Government of India, said, “There are three things: pricing, regulation, and water quality auditing for sustainable water governance. Besides, stronger statutory backing and empowered local institutions would be essential for the extended mission to succeed.”

The Dashboard Dilemma

The Mission falls under the Jal Shakti Ministry. For years, it was billed as the best version of India’s infrastructure-led welfare expansion, setting an ambitious target and monitoring implementation through dashboards.

When the scheme was launched in August 2019, only 3.23 crore rural households, or 16.7% of rural India, had tap water connections. By March 2026, the number had increased to 15.82 crore, covering more than 81% of rural homes, according to the Ministry’s data.

“The real challenge isn’t the last 20% of infrastructure coverage - it’s that the first 80% is quietly at risk,” Pratik Bakshi, Counsel for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) at consulting firm BTG Advaya, told The Secretariat.

Over the last decade, India’s flagship schemes have increasingly focused on measurable physical targets: toilets built, roads constructed, electricity connections released, LPG cylinders distributed, houses sanctioned, and now tap connections installed.

The government is creating visible assets, but is it ensuring that the system actually delivers, especially in the long run?

“Large programmes, due to the pressure of meeting deadlines, tend to optimise for what is measurable — like connections installed or villages certified — over what is harder to measure but ultimately more important: that is, whether water actually flows reliably, safely, and sustainably,” said Bakshi.

Dashboards can, after all, track how many kilometres of pipes were laid or how many households received connections. But the actual public service delivery presents a different picture.

Taps, Taps Everywhere, But Not Enough To Drink

Under Jal Jeevan Mission rules, a household is considered covered only if it receives a regular supply of 55 litres of safe drinking water per capita per day.

But the Functionality Assessment 2024, conducted across nearly 2.37 lakh rural households in 19,812 villages, found that while 98.1% of surveyed homes had tap connections, only 76% met all functionality standards.

The assessment covered 761 districts in 34 states and union territories. It said 86.5% households had working tap connections, 83.6% received water according to schedule, and 80.2% received adequate quantity of water.

Several states claiming near-universal tap water coverage under the Jal Jeevan Mission continue to face major gaps in actual water delivery.

According to the assessment report, Himachal Pradesh emerged as one of the best-performing states, with 99.9% tap coverage and 98.5% working connections, while 89.2% households received regular supply, and 93.1% reported acceptable water quality.

Punjab recorded 95.9% tap coverage and 93.2% regular supply, but only 79% households had fully functional tap connections.

Haryana’s assessment found severe district-level shortages despite high coverage, with districts like Mewat reporting only 33% potable water availability and Hisar seeing nearly 70% of households receiving less than the prescribed water supply norm.

The assessment also showed that Gujarat and Tripura, despite claiming 100% tap coverage, had functionality levels below 50%.

Minister Patil pointed out that the Centre mainly provides funding and technical support while the states handle project execution. “The states made the DPRs (detailed project reports), did the tendering, gave contracts and implemented the projects. According to that, the Centre released around ₹2.08 lakh crore,” he said.

According to the Ministry of Jal Shakti, states such as Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Assam, Jharkhand, and parts of Karnataka and Maharashtra have reported slower progress due to funding gaps, difficult terrain, groundwater stress, and delays in project execution.

Sourcing The Water

The first faultline is water availability itself.

Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, different states rely on different water sources, including groundwater and rivers.

States such as Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh depend heavily on groundwater through borewells, tubewells and hand pumps, while water-scarce states like Rajasthan and Gujarat increasingly rely on surface water sources such as canals, reservoirs and large river-link projects like the Narmada system and the Indira Gandhi Canal.

“I told them that source sustainability work should have been done first,” Minister Patil told The Secretariat. “Because there was no water source, they later had to search for water elsewhere. That increased the cost.”

The Mission is partly funded by the Centre and partly by the states.

In March, the Union Cabinet approved an enhanced total outlay of ₹8.69 lakh crore for it. Total Central assistance was upped to ₹3.59 lakh crore from ₹2.08 lakh crore approved in 2019-20.

Several states rushed to expand pipeline networks before securing sustainable water sources. In many regions, groundwater was expected to support village schemes indefinitely. But falling groundwater tables and contamination problems soon destabilised supply systems.

India extracts around 245–247 billion cubic metres (BCM) of groundwater annually.

Anurag Srivastava, Additional Chief Secretary, Namami Gange and Rural Water Supply Department, Uttar Pradesh, said, “Uttar Pradesh has provided about 2.44 crore tap-water connections so far, of which nearly 80% are functional.”

But nearly 85% of the state’s rural water supply system under the Mission depends on groundwater sources, while only around 15% is based on surface water, he said.

Poor Construction 

Poor quality of work is another reason, like in Ram Prakash’s case. His tap water connection was disrupted by a faulty pipeline.

The Central government admits that substandard construction is a factor. “In several places, the overhead tanks were not built properly. Pipelines were not laid correctly. Pipes that should have been buried deeper under the road were left near the surface,” Minister Patil said.

“Action has been taken against around 4,000 officials and contractors,” he said.

Governance Problem

Will it now deliver?

Rural water supply systems require regular electricity, functioning pumps, water quality testing, leak repairs, source sustainability, and trained local staff. These are continuous governance responsibilities, say experts.

More than 5 lakh Village Water and Sanitation Committees have been formed under the Jal Jeevan Mission. But many gram panchayats still lack engineers, technical staff, and stable revenue systems needed to operate rural water infrastructure in the long run.

The deeper structural issue is that JJM was designed as a construction programme and is now being asked to become a service delivery institution.

“National ambition and local implementation capacity rarely scale at the same pace, and the gap tends to show up not at the announcement stage but years later, at the point of service delivery,” Bakshi said.

The government needs to introduce rational user charges to fund maintenance and discourage wasteful water use. There should be tighter control over groundwater extraction, especially as unchecked agricultural and private usage threaten rural drinking water supplies, say experts.  

Navalawala said sustainable rural water delivery requires greater accountability and stronger village-level governance systems. “Water is a community resource; the government cannot manage water at this scale. People’s participation is required to make it a success,” he said.

He pointed out that rural drinking water systems were competing with unsustainable agricultural extraction, which consumes nearly 80% of India’s freshwater resources. “Water usage efficiency is only about 35-40%. It can be easily enhanced by using drip irrigation and sprinklers,” he said.

And finally, he said, regular water quality audits were a must to ensure that the government would not just be counting tap connections on paper.