Accessibility to Safe Drinking Water and its Impact on Health A Case Study of EAG States and Assam

Abstract

The access to basic household amenities like availability of safe drinking water, toilet facility and electricity etc. are critical determinants of well being of people. Over the last three decades there have been huge changes in availability of these facilities with large regional differences. Being a country of 246,692,667 number of households, in India only 85.5 percent of households have access to safe drinking water including within premises, near premises and away from the premises in 2011 while the same was only 77 percent during 2001(Census of India, 2011). In this paper an attempt has been made to investigate the condition prevailing in the eight EAG (Empowered Action Group) states which includes Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Assam. The paper uses data from the Annual Health Survey 2011 (data of diarrhea) and Census 2011 (data on household amenities). The district level pattern of household’s accessibility to safe drinking water and tap water from treated source for rural and urban areas has also been analysed for the study. The result shows that the problem of safe drinking water has two interfaces. One in terms of the source of drinking water and the other is distance from the source. Study shows that most of the districts have access to safe drinking water although there is a rural urban gap still persisting. Urban areas have better coverage of provision to safe drinking water than rural counterparts. The same scenario becomes much worse for household’s access to tap water from treated source. The other finding indicates a possible association between safe drinking water and diarrhea.