Right to Drinking Water
As per the 2001 census, India has about 594,000 inhabited villages across the country and over 80% of these villages have a population of less than 5,000 people. Even though access to drinking water has improved to about 86%, still large populations have to walk for kilometers to get safe water. Water quality is a constant concern and the World Bank estimates 21% of the communicable diseases in India are related to unsafe water. Diarrhea alone causes over 1600 deaths in India every day. So the scale of the problem is acute.