Assessment of employment generation potentials of Jal Jeevan mission

Abstract

Launched in 2019, the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) aims at providing Functional Household Tap Connection (FHTC) to every rural household in the country, with the provision of 55 litres per capita per day (lpcd). Since 2019, when coverage of rural household was only 16.63%, the mission has been able to cover about 2/3rd of rural households so far. One of the distinct features of the mission is that it lays emphasis on service delivery rather than only creation of infrastructure. Moreover, with the large amount of investments being made in infrastructure development and the involvement of local community in its management, the mission holds significant potential in creating employment in various phases of its implementation. So far, there are hardly any studies conducted on the extent of employment generation under the government funded water supply schemes. In this backdrop, this study aims to assess the employment generation potentials of JJM at various stages of its implementation. We utilised secondary data and scheme level primary data from major states of India and used input-output model and ratio method to assess the overall as well as the direct and indirect employment potential under JJM. Our results suggest that JJM has the potential to generate an average of 5,993,154 person-year of direct and 22,255,324 person-year of indirect employment during the construction phase, and 1,118,749 person-year of additional direct employment annually during the Operations & Management (O&M) stage. Our study highlights these spillover effects of public investments in rural water supply systems in the form of employment generation.