Most editions of this newsletter talk about how far we've come, and that there's still room to grow. But once in a while I come across a data point where the size of the shift that remains to be completed takes me by surprise.
India has made remarkable progress in extending access to clean drinking water to its citizens, both rural and urban, I find in my work on drinking water. "At the beginning of the 2000s, fewer than eight in ten Indians had access to basic drinking water, …lower than the world average. Over the last two decades, India has made steady progress. Nearly 95% of Indian households now have access to basic drinking water, a rate of progress that has surpassed the world's on average," I write in the piece.
However, this drinking water is delivered to households in many different forms, including, as I found, the growing reliance of urban households in particular on bottled water, and the continued use of hand pumps and tube wells in rural India. Tap water or piped water as the primary source of drinking water for households still has a long way to go - by 2023, tap water was the primary source of drinking water for fewer than 40% of rural households, I find.
There is no doubt that in rural areas in particular this is a line trending upwards, meaning that access to piped water has been growing steadily and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But it is also true that in some states in particular, there's significant ground yet to be covered.
As of 2023, for instance, just 6% of households in rural Uttar Pradesh used tap water as their principal source of drinking water, and the number was under 20% in both Bihar and Jharkhand, with handpumps accounting for most of the remainder, I found.
The trend over time is certainly a positive one, but the pace of progress on tap water is not what I would have expected. Given the tight linkages between clean piped drinking water and better health especially for children, as well as reduced manual labour for women, this is a big shift that could use an acceleration.
