Background: The rural population of India comprises of more than 700 million people residing in about 1.42 million habitations spread over 15 diverse ecological regions. Our country is also characterized by non-uniformity in level of awareness, socio-economic development, education, poverty and practices which add to the complexity of providing drinking water. Safe drinking water and sanitation are the major issues affecting the people in the country. It is estimated that around 37.7 million Indians are affected by water borne diseases annually leading to a loss of 73 million working days. 1.5 million children are estimated to die of diarrhea alone. The problem of chemical contamination is also prevalent with nearly 200,000 habitations in the country affected by poor quality water. The issue has taken a disastrous shape in the coastal areas of Gujarat. Gujarat, facing the problem of salinity ingress, the situation of coastal villages has worsened despite efforts to provide water through pipelines from faraway surface water reservoirs.

As a part of Kharash Vistarotthan Yojana (KVY) initiative of Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Coastal Salinity Prevention Cell (CSPC) in collaboration with TATA – GE has initiated a project on “Special Drinking Water and Sanitation project for GHED area of Junagadh and Porbandar districts of Gujarat”. The project envisages addressing the issue of supply of safe drinking water and sanitation in salinity affected coastal villages of Porbandar and Junagadh district. Water supply and safe hygiene practices go hand in hand and promoting the latter is also an integral component of the overall project. Water quality problem, primarily, the high levels of salinity, will be addressed through the adoption of appropriate technological solutions, namely Reverse Osmosis (RO) processes, and the extensive technical expertise and backup support of General Electric (GE) will provide the technical backbone for the establishment of water supply systems in the identified problem villages. Taking into account the unique quality related problems of the existing drinking water sources, and the need to factor in a technological solution to address the same, the Trust proposes to pilot this special drinking water project in 10 selected coastal villages in the Ghed region of coastal Saurashtra. The selected villages are from the areas bordering the districts of Porbandar and Junagadh. The collaborative project between the Trust and GE proposes to build up on the latter’s back-up support in providing all the technological support for the RO based drinking water supply system, while the socio engineering and implementation of the programme activities will be through locally based support organization –Saurashtra Voluntary Actions (SAVA). The overall project management, facilitation and monitoring of the programme activities will be carried out by CSPC, with the technical backstopping support from ENV-DAS, Lucknow.

Expected Impact: The project expects to cover a total of 4,221 households (25,000 beneficiaries) across the 10 project villages. The projections estimated under the project are as follows: