India has achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for drinking water by providing 84 per cent of its rural population with access to improved sources of water, Rural Development Minister C P Joshi today said here.
However, the country is facing a tremendous challenge in sustaining drinking water security in rural areas as most water sources are ground water-based and have been overexploited for agriculture and industry besides being subjected to untreated sewage, he said.
The MDGs are eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organisations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015.
“India has achieved considerable progress in providing clean and safe drinking water in most rural areas of the country. I am happy to say that we have achieved the MDG for drinking water...However, there is much to achieve. Our goal is to provide every household with an improved source of drinking water by 2012,” Joshi said addressing the 4th International Learning Exchange programme on water, sanitation and hygiene organised by the Unicef here.
Joshi said overexploitation of ground water sources is posing a “growing” threat to the country’s drinking water security.
“We are, therefore, moving away from exclusive dependence on groundwater to reviving traditional water bodies and to the practice of collecting rain water, practices that were neglected when the handpump revolution came up.”
There have also been “heartening” examples of community ground water monitoring and crop water budgeting in Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, “models of which we hope to replicate on a larger scale to avoid over-drawing the ground water resources,” he said.