The Hindu, 16 July 2014
A person in rural India has to spend, on an average, 20 minutes to fetch drinking water outside his/her premise. According to the NSS 69th round survey on drinking water, sanitation, hygiene and housing conditions, 62.3 per cent of rural Indians in 2012 did not have access to bathroom facilities. The different indicators used to express the quality of living conditions point to a wide gap in the non-availability of sanitation facilities in urban and rural areas.
More than 75 per cent of the rural households in bigger states have access to ‘good quality’ drinking water. Likewise, more than 70 per cent urban households in bigger states have access to quality drinking water except in Assam (63.8%) and Jammu and Kashmir (65.6%).The survey noted that water quality was deemed ‘good’ if the households had reported that there was ‘no defect’ in the water they received. Read more....