Practice Test 21

Access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation is a fundamental human right and a prerequisite for good health, human dignity, and economic productivity, yet for much of India's history a significant proportion of the rural population lacked reliable access to treated piped water supply and a majority of rural households did not have access to hygienic toilet facilities within their homes, forcing family members, particularly women and girls, to resort to open defecation with serious consequences for public health, personal safety, and dignity. The Swachh Bharat Mission, launched on the one hundred and forty-fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi on second October 2014, undertook the historic challenge of making India open defecation-free by constructing over eleven crore household toilets in rural areas and urban settings within five years, backed by an intensive behaviour change communication campaign to overcome deeply entrenched cultural practices and social norms around open defecation. The mission achieved its target of making India open defecation-free in October 2019, a landmark achievement that independent surveys and evaluations broadly confirmed, representing one of the world's most significant public health interventions in terms of scale and speed. Swachh Bharat Mission Phase Two, launched in 2020, focuses on sustaining the gains of phase one by maintaining toilet usage, graduating villages to Open Defecation-Free Plus status with higher standards of solid and liquid waste management, and constructing community managed solid and liquid waste processing facilities in gram panchayats. The Jal Jeevan Mission, announced in August 2019 with a budgetary allocation of over three and a half lakh crore rupees, set the objective of providing functional household tap connections supplying fifty-five litres of potable water per person per day to every rural household in the country by 2024. The mission has accelerated the pace of rural water supply infrastructure creation significantly, adding several crore new tap connections to rural households in a few years, a rate of expansion unprecedented in the history of India's rural water supply programme. Water quality testing laboratories established at the district level and portable testing kits provided to women self-help groups in villages enable communities to regularly test the quality of their water supply and report contamination for remedial action. Urban water supply has received attention through AMRUT, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, which is funding the creation and upgradation of water supply systems in five hundred urban centres including installation of water meters, replacement of aged pipelines, and expansion of treatment capacity. The National Water Policy emphasises the prioritisation of drinking water use over all other uses including agriculture and industry, the conservation of traditional water bodies, and the adoption of an integrated river basin approach to water resources management.