India was aware of the critical importance of water.  From the 1920s Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, had propagated the idea.  "In this land of ours ......", he wrote, "there is the lofty Himalayas with its ever lasting snows.  It has mighty  rivers like the Ganges.  But owing to our neglect and folly, the year's rains are allowed to run down into the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea.  If all this water was tapped and harnessed to irrigational purposes by the construction of dams and tanks, there should be no famine and food shortage in India."  Such massive and widespread conservation and harvesting of water must be, according to Gandhiji, accompanied by meticulous steps by the people to avoid wastage of water.  "Every pint of water", he exhorted, "whether from bathing and ablutions, or from the kitchen, should be turned into backyard vegetable beds.  Not a drop of water should be allowed to be wasted."  Gandhiji also deplored our habit of polluting water.  "In the modern rush", he said, "the chief use we have for our rivers is to empty our gutters in them and to navigate our cargo vessels, and in the process make them dirtier still. 

We have no time . . . . . to stroll down to these rivers and in the silent meditation to listen to the message they murmur to us."  Apart from this philosophical point  Gandhiji had emphasized the capital need for ensuring the purity of water and pointed out how most illnesses in the rural areas originate from polluted water.  He gave meticulous instructions with regard to removing impurities from water before consumption and emphasized the importance of sanitation as a primary requirement for health and good living.  Having set personal example in regard to sanitation he said:  "If only a few leaders would evince enthusiasm and take in hand the task of imparting this kind of education to people, a great change can be effected in our condition."  All the elements of national water policy in its larger outline as well as in its smaller details of community action and leadership role have been visualized by Mahatma Gandhi even before we embarked upon our independent development and our national planning.

In 1984 the Government of India introduced a National Water Supply and Sanitation Programme, and since then the States have built up Departments of Health Engineering to tackle the problems of water supply and sanitation.  In 1972 the Union Government started the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme which allocated 100% grants-in-aid for problem villages.  To this was added the Minimum Needs Programme in 1974 as a special rural water supply and sanitation scheme.  Finally, the Government of India under the leadership of Shri Rajiv Gandhi formulated a National Water Policy which gave priority to the basic problem of drinking water for the people and set up a Technology Mission for Drinking Water in the rural sector which was later renamed the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission.

The primary objective of this programme was the provision of 40 litres of safe potable water to every Indian in the rural sector - a modest target compared to 260 litres of water consumed by every citizen per day in New York and 180 litres in London.  It is estimated that 76% of the rural population has so far been covered by this programme at a total approximate cost of Rs.15000 crores.  This is no mean achievement considering that the population of India has increased three-fold since Independence and that economic activities in the country both in the industrial and agricultural sector have witnessed tremendous expansion.

It is against this background of achievement and the targets yet to be achieved that the Third National Water Congress is meeting in Delhi to-day.  The origin of this Congress was in the realization of the necessity of a national forum for engineers, academicians, policy makers, planners, bureaucrats, politicians, social scientists and social workers to meet, discuss and deliberate upon this vital issue and devise strategies and programmes for solving this basic problem concerning the rural people, their health, and development.  This Congress is devoted to sustainability issues connected with the supply of drinking water.  In India there have been no dearth of discussions on this subject.  If discussion could solve the problem we have had an excess of it  -- indeed a flood of it -- in our country.  I hope this Congress will zero in upon practical ways of solving the problem and inspire practical action at various levels in our vast country.

The key to the success of this grand, imaginative and yet elementary programme of providing drinking water lies in community action and in arousing the initiative of the people.  As Gandhiji pointed out if only a few leaders - to-day we need not a few but leaders in every village, to impart awareness and knowledge of elementary techniques to the people.  It is admitted that hand pumps fixed to a tubewell or a bore well in the villages remain unoperational due to lack of maintenance and repair.  The Rajiv Gandhi Mission has launched a Grass Root Level Training Programme in 1994 for training young people in the maintenance and repair of these pumps.  Mechanics and masons are to be trained, one person each in a village.  And the people are to be provided sanitation facilities, house-hold latrines, garbage disposal facilities and taught the ways of domestic and personal hygiene.  Disposal of human waste is a principal problem connected to safe drinking water. 

If people could be educated in these ways and provided basic facilities we could bring about a revolution in healthy living and economic regeneration of our society.  This is a task easier to be said than done.  We need a corps of dedicated workers with some elementary knowledge of scientific techniques and the spirit of social service.  Can we create a corps of such people outside the bureaucratic system, and can we transform the village bureaucracy itself to be helpful in encouraging such activities?  Unemployed people with a minimum of education could be utilized for this purpose.  That would perhaps lift them from the state of purposelessness and uselessness into which they find themselves and help them in becoming agents of change in village society.  The Panchayat Raj system which is under operation in our countryside could play a leading role in this process of transformation.