Shillong, Jan 11: The state government has denied Centre stopping Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) and added that the current achievement is over 33 per cent.
JJM is aimed at providing safe drinking water through individual household pipes.
Following a media report, the Chief Minister Conrad Sangma and PHE minister Renikton Lyngdoh Tongkhar asserted that the Centre continues to support the project.
Conrad said around 10 lakh individuals have been benefited from the scheme.
According to Renikton, the state had received bonus for conducting work smoothly.
The minister said the issue related to low quality pipe was there and it has been addressed to some extent.
He said the government is targetting over 5 lakh households under the scheme.
Stating that the progress is good, the minister said lakhs of households have been connected.
In a statement, the JJM mission director SM Andaleeb Razi said when the mission was launched, the baseline survey showed that out of 5,89,888 rural households in the state only 4550 (0.77%) households had piped water supply and Meghalaya was at the bottom among all states as far as coverage was concerned. From that stage, the state has been able to achieve 1,97,944 (33.56%) functional household tap connections till date and Meghalaya now lies 25th in terms of coverage and 15th in terms of achievement under JJM in the country.
“Efforts of JJM Meghalaya were duly recognised by the Centre which even granted a bonus of Rs 10 crore in 2021-22.
Razi said that progress has been achieved despite wide spread disruptions on account of Covid-19 and certain constraints like very short working season on account of monsoon and poor connectivity due to difficult terrain.
As far as quality issues are concerned, the state has empanelled ‘Third Party Inspection Agencies’ for checks on quality and these agencies have consistently rated quality as satisfactory’, the official said.
“Even for GI pipes, the state utilises the services of a third-party inspection agency for pre-delivery checks and despite that if quality issues are noticed, corrective action is taken by field engineers”, he said.
According to the official, there are hiccups which one encounters during the implementation of such a project .
“Keeping quality as the upper most criteria the supply of pipes has been restricted to reputed vendors. The stock when received is inspected as per guidelines and instances have been there where we had rejected supplies on account of deficiency of quality and payment has been withheld against such supply”, the official added.
