Insights From Solinas
By Devi, Team Solinas
India has, by every official count, done something remarkable. Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, over 15.7 crore rural households now have tap water connections.
But in many cities, only less than half of households with a tap connection actually use it as their primary source of clean drinking water.
So what is happening? The taps are there. The pipes are laid. The money has been spent.
But the water is either NOT FLOWING, NOT CLEAN OR BOTH.
The Gap Between Tap Connections and Clean Water
Think about the last time your city dug up a road to fix a burst pipe. Chances are, no one knew the pipe was failing until water started pooling on the surface.
Here is a question worth sitting with: if a pipe is cracking two metres underground and no water has surfaced yet how would anyone know?
The honest answer is: they wouldn’t.
And this is exactly why the clean drinking water crisis in India is not just about building more infrastructure. It is about understanding what is happening inside the infrastructure we have already built.
Why is clean drinking water important?
Because contaminated water is not a minor inconvenience. It is a matter of life and death.
In late December 2025, residents of Bhagirathpura in Indore, a densely populated neighbourhood of 15,000 people, reported that their tap water had an unusual smell, bitter taste, and visible discoloration.
Within days, at least 9 people were dead, over 270 were hospitalized, and more than 1,400 residents experienced severe gastrointestinal symptoms.
The cause?
A public toilet had been constructed directly above a 30-year-old drinking water main. Without a proper septic tank, raw sewage drained into a pit and seeped into a leaking joint in the pipeline. Laboratory tests confirmed E. coli, Salmonella, and Vibrio cholerae in the municipal water supply.
Jal Jeevan Mission
The Indian government has not been sitting still.
Over the last decade, India has launched some of the most ambitious water and sanitation programmes in its history. The most visible of these efforts is the Jal Jeevan Mission.
Launched in 2019 with the goal of connecting every rural household to a tap water supply, JJM achieved something extraordinary by laying 12+ crore new piped water connections in six years. That is a feat of public administration that few countries have matched at this scale.
But every large programme has gaps.
What JJM Still Needs to Address?
A tap connection is recorded as complete when the pipe reaches the house. Whether clean drinking water flows through it with adequate pressure, on schedule, and to drinking quality is a different question entirely.
Only a few states currently have comprehensive repair and maintenance policies in place. The remaining states have infrastructure built under JJM with no formal plan for what happens when something breaks.
The data quality problem is real.
What’s Really Inside India’s Drinking Water Pipelines?
Your city’s water network has hundreds of kilometres of pipelines. Some were laid 15 years ago. Some were laid 40 years ago.
How many of those pipelines have been inspected from the inside, even once?
For most Indian cities, the honest answer is almost none.
What we know from the cases that have been investigated is that the inside of an aging water pipeline tells a story the outside never could. Corrosion, Cracks, Illegal connections, Cross-contamination with sewage, Tree routes, Sludge and more.
None of these are visible from above ground. All of them turn our clean drinking water project into a public health liability.
How Is Solinas Solving the Clean Drinking Water Crisis?
During one of our recent deployments in Karnataka, a residential locality had been reporting the same complaint for weeks; the water smelled strange, and people were falling sick.
The local utility suspected a fault somewhere along an old cast iron main running beneath the area. The pipe was nearly 40 years old. The traditional approach would have been to dig at multiple points along the stretch and hope the fault revealed itself.
Instead, we sent our endobot in. A crawler robot small enough to travel inside a live pipeline and transmit live video and sensor data to engineers above ground.
Within hours a cracked pipe section where a poorly maintained house sewage connection had created a cross-contamination point was identified. Sewage was silently entering the drinking water line.
This is what access to clean drinking water actually looks like in practice.
Endobot in Action>>>
Does Your City Get Safe Drinking Water?
A woman in Patna who gets water for two hours a day does not know and should not need to know what SCADA means, what NRW stands for, or how old the pipes under her street are.
She just wants water that flows when she opens the tap. Water that is safe to drink. Water that does not make her children sick.
That is what the importance of clean drinking water looks like at street level. And meeting that goal requires more than ambitious targets and installation counts.
It requires knowing what is happening inside the pipes.