We make five recommendations to strengthen the existing data and information systems and validate the progress with the provision of safely managed drinking water services in rural areas. They include:

• Standardise terminologies and indicators used across existing surveys: They should be in line with those used for determining the safely managed drinking water services to allow better inferences on the progress made. For this, the agencies engaged in conducting the Census of India, NSS, and NFHS and the one managing the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) dashboard need to initiate discussions for arriving at a consensus.
• Expand the scope of future surveys to cover all the indicators of safely managed drinking water services: This will help in validating the progress reported by the recent JJM IMIS dashboard, especially in the context of physical access to the source and the reliability of the water supply. JJM does have a provision to undertake an annual functionality assessment survey of tap water connection for each district by a third-party agency. This provides an opportunity for various national agencies in charge of surveys to collaborate for such assessments and thereby make efficient use of available resources.
• Scale up the Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart water supply monitoring system piloted under JJM to cover all the villages: This will need proper planning and substantial investments, therefore, it can only be undertaken in a phased manner with priority to areas that experience water stress so that decisions can be made on the need to augment water supplies in such areas. In addition to the quantity of daily water supply, such a monitoring system should also report ‘frequency and duration of water supply’ and ‘values of water quality parameter’. JJM does have a provision where every state needs to prepare a five-year action plan projecting annual financial requirements for achieving JJM targets. Investments required for the water supply monitoring system can be made part of such a plan.
• Meter individual water connections to account for water delivery at the household level: Individual water meters should be installed for generating data on the indicator ‘quantity of water supplied at the household level’. Presently, the pilot IoT-based smart water supply monitoring system provides information based on the bulk water supply to the village. However, information about the actual water supply at the household level is unavailable. Household level metering will fill this gap. To ensure regular reporting of such data (at least every month), village water and sanitation committees (VWSC), a local institution for operation and maintenance of village water supply schemes, can be engaged.
• Compute water quality index (WQI) to monitor source water quality and identify sources that need further investigation: The WQI provides a single score by summarising the values of several water quality parameters and helps classify source water quality as excellent, good, medium, bad, or very bad. The WQI scores can be used to monitor changes in source water quality over time and identify sources that should be investigated further, especially those that 3 are in the WQI benchmark values for the bad or very bad category. This can help decide on prospective corrective measures for improving the source water quality. Such an approach will augment the existing practice where the VWSC (using field kits) or the laboratories test the water samples for various parameters but only report their values.