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New Delhi: A parliamentary panel flagged a financing gap in the country's urban water infrastructure and recommended urgent steps to strengthen funding and operations under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) 2.0.

Emphasising the need for long-term planning, the committee also said that the Union Housing and Urban Affairs (HUA) Ministry should assess additional financial requirements of the urban water supply sector, aligning with demand projections and growth patterns till 2047.

The panel on housing and urban affairs, chaired by Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, presented its report on the AMRUT in Lok Sabha, with special emphasis on urban drinking water.

According to the report, the committee evaluated the adequacy of financial investments under AMRUT 1.0 and AMRUT 2.0 in comparison with projections made by the high-powered expert committee (HPEC), 2011.

The HPEC was set up for estimating the investment requirements for urban infrastructure services. It estimated that Rs 3.2 lakh crore would be required for infrastructure of urban water supply and Rs 5.5 lakh crore for operations and maintenance (O&M) over a 20-year period (2012-2031).

"The committee observed that while AMRUT has led to a notable scaling-up of investments in urban water supply infrastructure, the total sanctioned amount still meets only about half of the requirement projected by HPEC for the 20-year period, 2012-2031, which is set to conclude in the next five to six years," it stated.

The panel has asked the HUA ministry to conduct a comprehensive assessment of state-level water sector investments to gauge cumulative progress towards the HPEC-estimated requirement.

The committee recommended that the ministry, in coordination with various stakeholders, should urgently commission a unified national-level assessment and projection of urban drinking water demand for next 25 to 30 years.

This exercise should account for projected population growth, migration trends, climate resilience, resource sustainability and technological interventions, the report said.

The findings should form the basis for a 'National Urban Water Security Strategy', which would guide reforms, infrastructure investments and institutional capacity building across all levels of governance to ensure future-ready and water-secure cities, it added. 

(This report has been published as part of the auto-generated syndicate wire feed. Apart from the headline, no editing has been done in the copy by ABP Live.)