New Delhi, Dec 20 (PTI) The Union Jal Shakti Ministry aims to provide tap water supply to all rural households in nine states and Union Territories by next year, a senior official said on Monday.

The remaining 16 crore rural households across the country will be provided with functional household tap connection by 2024, said Bharat Lal, the additional director and director-general of Jal Jeevan Mission.

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According to the data shared by him, the Jal Shakti Ministry aims that all households in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Jammu and Kashmir, Meghalaya and Ladakh will be provided with functional household tap connections in 2022.

In 2023, all rural households in another nine states will be provided with a tap water connection. These states are Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland and Chhattisgarh.

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Till now, all rural households have been provided tap water connections in Goa, Telangana, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Puducherry, Dadra And Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and Haryana.

Jal Jeevan Mission aims to provide safe and adequate drinking water through individual household tap connections by 2024 to all households in rural India.

"With existing piped water supply systems, all remaining households in villages will be provided with water supply by retrofitting and augmenting, if needed, so that 'no one is left out'," he said.

He said multi-disciplinary teams are visiting villages to interact with the community, understand the implementation of the mission and support the state in planning and roll-out of the Jal Jeevan Mission.

"A task force has been constituted to analyze various drinking water programmes taken up by various states and Union Territories to learn drivers of successes and cause of failures to use this in the Jal Jeevan Mission," Lal said.

He also said that 1,301 newly emerged arsenic (883) and fluoride- (418) affected habitations are being covered through piped water supply on priority by March 2022.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)