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| No planning to improve water sanitation | | JK fails to submit CWMI to Centre | | Early Times Report
SRINAGAR, Aug 21: With majority population in Jammu and Kashmir receiving contaminated water, the state government has failed to furnish data for its Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) to the Centre.
Only 60 percent population in Jammu and Kashmir has access to tap water, of which 34.7 percent get water from treated sources and 29.2 percent from untreated sources.
According to the guidelines, it is mandatory that all the drinking water sources have to be tested once in a year for chemical contamination and twice for bacteriological contamination. Besides, the proper filtration of water has to be a continuous process.
However, the JK did not submit data for its CWMI to the Centre to improvise drinking water sanitation.
An official of Public Health Engineering Department said that due to the lack of data, the categorization of J&K couldn't happen for future planning to improve drinking water situation.
"It is not known to which category JK belonged. Categorisation of states have been done as high, medium and low performing states. Based on the categorization, every state would have to work in future to improve water availability and quality," the official said.
The Central Government has released the list of rankings in which the column for Jammu and Kashmir was interestingly, left blank due to the non-availability of any sort of details. The official said that JK government hasn't completed the process of collecting the data on time due to which it couldn't forward the details to the Centre.
"This was the first ever major exercise carried out to know the scenario of water resources in each state. J&K was the only state, which failed to furnish the details of its water management programmes, which has miffed the Centre for JK's non-cooperation," the official said.
People have been often complaining that unfiltered and muddy tap water was being supplied to them without any filtration being done.
In J&K thousands of water supply schemes were taken up for execution over the years, majority of them have not been completed thus forcing people to consume water from the contaminated sources.
"These schemes could not be completed due to non-availability of funds," an official of public health engineering department said.
In some areas, water is being supplied through water tanks while in some areas people fetch water from streams and rivers without being filtered.
There has been sharp increase in water borne diseases for the past several years which according to health experts in their reports had mentioned that these diseases had emerged due to supplying of "contamination and unfiltered" water to the people. |
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