Jal Jeevan Mission or ‘Water for Life’ mission is a flagship scheme of the Government of India to provide piped water supply to every rural household within premises. Announced by the Prime Minister in August 2019, the mission set out an ambitious target to cover the remaining 161 million households which were lacking piped water supply in their premises by 2024, making it one of the world’s largest piped water supply programmes.

Commemorating the unique journey of Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM), a special report was published by Sankala Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on climate and sustainability, in partnership with United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) on 20th September 2024 in New Delhi. The report provides insights into the innovative strategies adopted by the mission to successfully provide tap water supply connections to about 120 million households since its roll-out. Additionally, the book also compiled successful case studies offering an exhaustive look at the various building blocks that the mission relied on for this transition to improved services.

The report titled ‘Jal Jeevan Mission – Har Ghar Jal: A study of access to clean tap water to every rural home in India’ offers valuable lessons to other countries in similar settings facing challenges of scaling up regional efforts to a national level program. The report delves into the topics of planning for universal coverage ensuring equity and inclusion and leaving no one behind, identifying priority areas, accessing resources through convergence with other water programmes, finding suitable and affordable technologies for water supply and increased public awareness, building capacities of stakeholders at all levels, ensuring transparency and accountability measures through third party monitoring and annual functionality surveys, and above all use of technology for monitoring service levels and water quality.

Two of the Water-WISER students who have previously worked on this mission under the guidance of the then Mission Director and Additional Secretary, Mr. Bharat Lal now had the opportunity to contribute to the report, this time as researchers and writers. Spurthi Kolipaka is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Leeds, and Renjitha M.H. is a final-year PhD student at Cranfield University.

Spurthi visited India in April 2024 as part of her PhD’s data collection period and pre-planned with her supervisors to meet and work along with the wider researchers team at Sankala Foundation.

After discussing with her supervisors, Spurthi who penned a significant part of the report, while in India to collect data for her PhD research work in April 2024, engaged with the wider research team at Sankala Foundation. She supported the team by guiding them toward relevant resources and field personnel, sharing her experience of JJM planning and roll-out, helping with chapter structure and brainstorming, as well as editing and refining a few chapters. Renjitha further supported Spurthi by editing and finetuning the few chapters authored by her.

In Spurthi’s words, “I am beyond thrilled to see the published report. This was the result of a lot of hard work especially by the Sankala team researchers who I had the privilege to work with during my field visit. This is probably the only report on JJM out there that truly captures the initial journey of JJM planning and roll-out, the myriad challenges faced by the team and the innovative strategies adopted. JJM stands as a shining example of systems change and the report hopefully offers valuable insights to other practitioners and researchers.”

The report will soon be made available on the Sankala website or those interested can email Spurthi at cnsk@leeds.ac.uk.

On 2-5 May the Water-WISER students and staff decamped to The World Forum conference centre in The Hague, Netherlands, for the IRC All Systems Connect 2023 conference.

This annual event is a huge (>700 attendees) meeting forum for WASH experts, policymakers and businesses, with the focus on connecting up silos and holistic thinking.

The All Systems event itself lasted 3 days, and included sessions chaired and developed by Water-WISER CDT students in a formal collaboration. Workshops and ‘sprints’ ranged from climate change solutions to financing WASH projects. Spurthi (pictured) had a high-profile role in the youth ‘sprint’ on climate change and WASH.

President Zhelensky turned up during the conference, with lots of security, meaning the Water-WISER group had to eat breakfast out of a bag that morning!

After the close of the IRC event, the Water-WISER group met at Het Nutshuis (IRC offices) in the city centre for a reflective workshop. J’Anna Lue and Euphresia Luseka, guest speakers, talked on positionality and decolonising research and the event was joined by international researchers from outside Water-WISER.

Photo credits: Robert Tjalondo (Rockin’ Pictures) for IRC

In November 2022, a series of events was organised by STEM Schools across the University of Loughborough in the week leading up to the International Day of LGBTQIA+ people in STEM. The theme of the week was ‘Educate, Celebrate and Support’, and was aimed at staff and students who identify as LGBT+ or are allies.

Within the events series, a group of researchers from the Water-WISER CDT hosted a workshop entitled ‘Safeguarding Queer Identities in Research’. Georgia Hales, Hannah Robinson and Zhe Zhan (CDT-aligned student at Leeds) talked about the relevance of LGBT+ identities within research undertaken across the CDT. They cited examples from their own experience and research and covered topics including inclusive terminology in public health policy relating to gender, how gender affects access to, and use of, water and sanitation services, and collecting data from LGBT+ participants. They also looked at issues of safeguarding for LGBT+ researchers conducting fieldwork.

My project focused on developing a methodology for spatially representing sanitation systems in unsewered cities in the global south. I have spent three weeks over the months of July and August 2022 doing fieldwork to validate a prototype developed using open-source data for a small area of Rajshahi city in northwest Bangladesh. The sole sanitation system in this city is comprised of individually controlled and maintained onsite septic tanks and pits.

The aim of the fieldwork was to find out how effective the methodology is at mapping faecal matter sources and their movement. The informal usage of the city’s storm drainage network is the way of supernatant fluid movement; in some situations or in certain portions (older part) of the city, faecal solids are also carried out of the city via those drains.

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On Saturday 7th¬†May, Water-WISER students Karl Jones, Hannah Ritchie and Lais Dos Santos took part in the Be Curious festival of science at Leeds. This is an annual event where the University of Leeds opens up to over 1000 members of the public (mainly families with small children) to come and get hands-on with science. It’s an inspiring celebration of public engagement with hundreds of activities on offer.

Visitors to Water-WISER had to hook poo out of a tub of water, while learning all about hand washing and research into water purification. The game was really hard, even for adults! Luckily all the children kept a laser focus on removing all the poo, patiently waiting their turn and with hardly a tantrum in sight!

My PhD project is based on sand dams: small, concrete structures constructed across ephemeral streams, behind which sand accumulates, in which water is stored from the rainy season for use in the dry season. I am exploring the causes and impacts of lateral, longitudinal, and vertical losses of the water stored in sand dams to the sub-surface environment.

In 2022, I spent two months in Southeast Kenya in the short dry season (January – March), working on three dams being constructed that season and three mature dams. A lot of my time was spent collecting geophysical data, which we used to image the subsurface up to 25-30m deep, and data to constrain the geophysics, such as topography, water levels, rock depth, and soil profiles.

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This year’s Challenge Event took place at the Chevin Country Park Hotel near Leeds. Postponed from January due to the Omicron covid variant surge in infections, the event was intended to bring everyone together in person for presentations skills training and networking.
The event started on the first evening with a team-building short walk to Surprise View on Otley Chevin – a traditional photo opportunity for CDT groups.

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Mariam Zaqout, a CDT-aligned student, won the Water @ Leeds Spring Award, an impressive achievement as this is open to several hundred researchers. She also won ‘Best Paper’ at the 2021 WaterAid Research Awards for the paper Sustainable sanitation jobs: prospects for enhancing the livelihoods of pit-emptiers in Bangladesh (2021), Third World Quarterly.

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