The Ministry of
Jal Shakti

01

Why the ministry exists

Before May 2019, responsibility for water in the Government of India was split between two ministries. The Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation held irrigation, river basins, groundwater science and the Ganga programme. A separate Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation held rural water supply and the sanitation mission.

The division had a certain administrative logic — one ministry dealt with the resource, the other with a service — but it produced a structural problem. The two were working on the same aquifers and the same rivers, frequently in the same villages, and the service ministry had no authority over the resource on which its entire programme depended. A rural piped water scheme is only as durable as the source it draws from; a source is only as clean as the sanitation around it.

The Ministry of Jal Shakti was formed by merging the two, so that supply, sustainability and sanitation would be planned together. The word jal shakti translates roughly as water power or water strength; the institutional point of the merger was to place the resource and the service under a single line of accountability.

03

Rural drinking water

The Jal Jeevan Mission, launched in August 2019, is the ministry's largest service programme: a functional household tap connection supplying water of prescribed quality, in adequate quantity, on a regular basis, to every rural home. At the start of the mission 3.23 crore rural households — 16.7 per cent — were reported to have a tap connection. As at 31 March 2026, about 15.83 crore of roughly 19.36 crore households were reported to have one.

The restructured Jal Jeevan Mission 2.0, approved by the Union Cabinet on 10 March 2026, shifts the programme's basis from infrastructure to service delivery, and makes a Gram Panchayat's Har Ghar Jal declaration conditional on the existence of working in-village operation and maintenance arrangements. Full reference →

04

Water resources and rivers

On the resource side, the ministry holds irrigation and water resources development, flood management, and the regulation and development of inter-state rivers. India's major rivers cross state boundaries, which is why their management is vested in national bodies — the Central Water Commission for hydrology and dam safety, the National Water Development Agency for basin studies, and statutory authorities for specific river systems where allocation between states is governed by award or agreement.

The Namami Gange Programme, implemented through the National Mission for Clean Ganga since 2014, is the largest of the river programmes. Full reference →

05

Groundwater science

The Central Ground Water Board conducts the Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment each year, in coordination with State governments, block by block. For 2025 it assessed annual recharge at 448.52 billion cubic metres, annual extractable resources at 407.75 BCM and annual extraction at 247.22 BCM — a national stage of extraction of 60.63 per cent.

That assessment is not an academic exercise. It determines which blocks are classified safe, semi-critical, critical or over-exploited, which in turn determines where conservation funds are concentrated and where the Central Ground Water Authority's extraction rules bite hardest. Full reference →

06

Sanitation

Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) Phase II runs from 2020–21 to 2026–27. Its objective is the ODF Plus village: one that sustains open-defecation-free status and has solid and liquid waste management arrangements in place. As reported by States and UTs as at 10 February 2026, 4,96,180 of 5,86,944 villages had been declared ODF Plus (Model). Full reference →