•An enormous portion of the funds have been diverted – for paying salaries, for defraying office expenses, for paying outstanding bills, for other schemes.

•Works said to have been completed do not exist; works have been ‘completed’ in non-existent villages; in other cases they have been taken up in villages that are already ‘fully covered’; works have been abandoned – in typical cases, pipes have been laid only part of the distance, pools have been dug where there is no water.

•Guidelines provide that the quality of water must be assessed: it is not assessed at all – water treatment plants have just not been installed as required.

•One half the Rural Protected Water Supply projects and a fifth of the tubewells shown as ‘completed’, found to be ‘non-functional’ or abandoned.

•In state after state, the expenditure figures turn out to be manifestly inflated; they turn out to be not just without authorization but ‘fictitious’.

•The Guidelines have provided a remedy very close to Chidambram’s heart – they require that Village Monitoring Committees and Special Monitoring and Inspection Units be set up; the CAG finds that in 14 states the committees are not holding regular meetings; 21 states have not nominated the required officials from the Health Department; 15 states have not established Special Monitoring and Investigation Units; in the remaining 11 states, these MIUs do not carry out field-level monitoring of quality of water, adequacy of service, etc.

•Guidelines require that the central and state governments monitor and evaluate the works from time to time: in 22 states, no evaluation studies have been carried out at all; in 17 states, officials from state headquarters have not visited districts, blocks and villages for inspections.

A ‘flagship’?

Or the tattered rag covering a sunken vessel?

(To be continued)

For all stories visit www.indianexpress.com/arunshourie