On 28th February 2024, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs conferred the first-ever Pey Jal Survekshan awards, coinciding with the latest current affairs. This recognizes outstanding efforts by cities to ensure water abundance through initiatives enhancing availability, quality, efficiency, and sustainability.
About this Initiative
- The awards valued public agencies’ phenomenal work around drinking water management, aligning closely with the Jal Jeevan Mission’s goals. They motivate ULBs countrywide to emulate such endeavors.
Jal Jeevan Mission – Key Focus Areas
- Ensuring potable tap water supply in all urban households, focusing on water quality surveillance and sustainability of infrastructure created.
Awards Categories
- 130 awards across sub-domains like quality, coverage, infrastructure creation, adoption of technology, financial sustainability etc., judgment based on extensive evaluation of numerous performance metrics.
Other Major Highlights Celebrating Significant Strides • Gold awards for 53 cities, Silver awards for 52 cities and Bronze awards for 25 cities showcasing major advancements enabling uninterrupted supply.
- Recognition also for Best Water Body, Sustainability Champion, Reuse Champion, Water Quality, City Saturation, AMRUT 2.0 Rotating Trophy winner.
Emphasizing Infrastructure Adequacy
- Awards consider creation of core water infrastructure weighing quantity and regularity aspects and management efficiency determining pressurized supply.
Leveraging Technology
- Increased adoption of technological interventions such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition and flow meters to monitor supply, identify gaps.
Mainstreaming Financial Sustainability
- Revenue potential, cost recovery, creditworthiness etc., ensuring cities reinvest surplus funds into system augmentation.
Key Award Statistics
| Particulars | Numbers |
| No. of cities won Gold awards | 53 |
| No. of cities won Silver awards | 52 |
| No. of cities won Bronze awards | 25 |
| Total no. of awards | 130 |
Dovetailing with National Policy Direction
The awards represent a welcome policy push towards realizing the Jal Jeevan Mission’s goals of providing tap water supply to all households by 2024-end. They will also feed into NITI Aayog’s broader endeavors to benchmark service levels across urban areas.
- The Pey Jal Survekshan comes at an opportune time when cities are undertaking infrastructure upgrades under various schemes like AMRUT, SBM to extend coverage.
- The survey provides an avenue for them to assess progress across critical sub-domains and address gaps through appropriate interventions.
Empowering Effective Decision Making
By covering over 5000 ULBs across the country, the Pey Jal Survekshan gathered vast amounts of credible data to enable fact-based planning and execution by civic agencies.
- The granular metrics allow customized comparison of service levels between cities with varying profiles and resources.
- They can utilize analytical insights from the survey results to make strategic investment decisions optimizing finances and assets towards targeted improvements.
Cities Emerging as Change Leaders
Pey Jal Survekshan winners like Indore, Surat, Bengaluru have set examples for others to emulate by aligning policies and ground-level efforts to ensure reliability, quality, sustainability around drinking water.
- Indore’s turnaround within years by rehauling the distribution network adopting sensor-based systems merits mention.
- Initiatives on recycling, rainwater harvesting and efficiency in cities also provide a template for replication nationwide.
Thus, by identifying and conferring recognition to high-performing cities, the survey motivates neighboring towns to take lead from their successes, triggering a domino effect over time.
Way Forward
While witnessing encouraging progress currently, India needs its cities to continue driving advancement around drinking water to attain the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals focused on safe water and sanitation.
- Sustaining current momentum over the next 2-3 Pey Jal Survekshans will be vital for this.
The awards thus incentivize cities to build on achievements through enhanced targets, ensuring the gains made so far have a lasting impact.
This first-of-its-kind Survey rewards municipalities spearheading the movement towards securing India’s water future through operational efficiency, infrastructure upgrades and sustainability efforts – the key areas needing attention for water security in urban areas presently as highlighted in latest current affairs.
