For the 7,000 residents of Morkhi, a village in Haryana’s Jind district, drinking water comes for an average of Rs 75-100 every month from a private tubewell owner. Even this isn’t regular, the supply comes once in five days. For those who can’t afford to pay, ponds, wells and a couple of handpumps installed in the village are the only sources.This despite the fact that, according to the draft performance audit report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, Rs 22.3 crore were spent under the Rajiv Gandhi water mission between 1998 and 2005 in Jind and the districts of Sirsa, Fatehabad, Sonepat and Kaithal. As many as 87 of the 128 schemes sanctioned are still incomplete. In fact, four of the 20 water-supply schemes — including the ones in Morkhi — examined by the CAG team were found to be incomplete for as many as seven years despite an expenditure of Rs 2.84 crore.The project in Morkhi entails getting water from the nearby Morkhi Minor distributary of the West Yamuna Canal, treating it and then sending it to houses in the village through a network of underground pipes. “Work on the scheme began over five years ago but is still incomplete. We have made numerous requests to the district authorities, including the water supply department. But nothing has happened. We are always promised that water supply will begin in 15 days. But dozens of 15 days have come and gone but there is no safe drinking water,” says Siya Ram Bhardwaj, sarpanch of the village.Both Junior Engineer Naresh, whose job is to supervise the work, and the person he reports to, Executive Engineer Surat Singh Mann, wash their hands of.“I have taken charge just four months back. You ask the previous JE,” says Naresh. For his part, Mann, too, trots out the same reason: “I have taken over recently.the work will finish soon.”A visit to the site where construction work is supposed to happen is revelatory. Reservoirs and tanks have been dug but are still to be connected to the water source. All rooms, meant for supervisory staff, are locked and there are no workers at the site.And the government refuses to speed things up despite the fact that a state Health Department survey found that 29% of water samples in five districts is unfit for human consumption. That’s not all. Four district laboratories managed to test just 13,980 water samples as against the target of 94,000 samples during 2002-07.No wonder then that a survey ordered by the Centre on the status of supply of drinking water has not been completed by the state government till date. When contacted, Haryana Water Supply Minister Randeep Singh Surjewala blamed the previous Om Prakash Chautala government for not doing anything to complete the scheme between 2002 and 2005. “No work was done on the scheme during the reign of the previous government. Finally, work started in March-April 2005 and electric connection was given in October 2007. Now I have been told by the officials that the scheme would become operational by April 1,” he said.Not many are assured by this given the scale of the task unfinished. Consider the following, as per the CAG’s investigation:• Of the 1,971 villages which did not have clean drinking water by December 2004, 868 still remain deficient• 87 completed schemes remained non-functional for want of electricity connection. Some of these schemes were completed almost three years ago• Of the 148 schemes approved for the period 2002-06 at a cost of Rs 14.68 crore, only 25 were completed at a cost of Rs 2.34 crore till July 2007• As against a target of testing 1.62 lakh water samples, just a fifth was tested in seven laboratories in Haryana. Of these, 14% were found to be unfit for drinking • In the fluoride-affected districts of Narnaul and Rewari, the shortfall in collection of samples was 96% and 88% respectively.• As per Health Department figures, of the 35,671 water samples checked, 11661, almost a third, failed purity tests• Between 2005-07, 1613 villages were included in water supply schemes. But of these 510 were those villages that were not deficient in water supply.
