Photo Courtesy: nenow
Guwahati: The Jal Jeevan Mission is failing Assam tea garden workers. Officials promised regular, clean water to every home. They installed thousands of taps. Now, those taps stand dry. Residents across the state report the infrastructure remains useless. They continue to rely on traditional hand tubewells for daily survival.
Borbaruah Tea Estate in Dibrugarh shows the scale of the failure. Workers there received household taps nearly a year ago. Not one drop of water ever flowed. One resident expressed her frustration with the broken system. "The taps were installed around a year ago, but not a single drop of water has come through them. We still depend on hand tubewells for drinking water. If the taps cannot supply water, why were they installed in our homes? Almost every household has a tap, but there is no water," she said.
The Public Health Engineering Department oversees these projects. Critics now question the quality of their work and the integrity of the contractors involved. Lakhindra Kurmi of the Assam Tea Tribes Students’ Association claims the project is a disaster. He argues that officials poured crores into the mission, yet the objective remains unmet. Kurmi believes contractors are just grabbing cash while the workers suffer. He calls the entire mission a white elephant that ignores the actual needs of the people. Better coordination between government agencies and garden management might have saved the initiative, but that never happened. For now, the taps remain empty monuments to bureaucratic mismanagement.
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