Comments
The Phase 1 of Jalanidhi, or the Kerala Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project, has come in for praise from the World Bank.
The multilateral lender has described the progress of the project as ‘satisfactory' with ‘low or negotiable' risks for the development outcome, the office of the Executive Director of Jalanidhi said here on Wednesday.
The World Bank has gone on to assess the overall bank performance and the borrower performance as ‘satisfactory.'
SCHEMES PENDING
The Jalanidhi project was implemented by the Government of Kerala for improving the quality of rural water supply and environmental sanitation service delivery.
It has been implemented in all 3,172 participating communities in 112 grama panchayats.
The implementation completion report (ICR) of the World Bank pointed out that more than 3,000 demands for new schemes have been pending. This is an indicator to the large level of acceptance of the project principles.
The decentralised service delivery approach of Jalanidhi determined the success of the project, which also has the potential for scaling up access.
The good response to the first phase and raised public demand has lead to the formalisation of the second phase of the project slated for implementation soon.
Jalanidhi Phase 2 will cover 20 lakh people in over 200 grama panchayats across the State.
The ICR said that the phase 1 of the project has helped provide access to improved water services to about 9.95 lakh people, the implementation completion report of the World Bank observed.
Water supply coverage in these grama panchayats has increased from 55 to 81 per cent and sanitation overage raised from 76 to 86 per cent.
The project has also directly helped about 7.53 lakh people to have access to improved sanitation services, the World Bank noted.
As a token of appreciation of the project efforts to build up community awareness on sanitation and hygiene in relation to water, 85 out of the total 112 grama panchayats have been awarded with the Nirmal Gram Puraskar.
This is an award instituted by the Government of India under the Clean Village Programme for 100 per cent housed latrine coverage.
The World Bank had approved the project costing $89.8 million with a financing component of $65.5 million on November 7, 2000, which was completed on September 30, 2008.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.