Not only will this move ensure adequate availability of drinking water in the state, it will achieve this at a fraction of the cost associated with other alternatives like building new tube wells. It is not that the idea to tap these wells for potable water was a difficult one to think of.

Dropping pipe-lines into wells for the transportation of water to overhead tanks, from where it is distributed to a number of households, is not an uncommon sight in the state. It is also widely known that the three centuries old Mughal wells are very deep and do not dry up even in the worst of times. The whereabouts of these wells is also not to difficult to find out as the elders in most regions are easily able to point out exactly where in their localities such wells had existed. The exercise merely required government initiative and the previous governments clearlyfailed in doing so.

The reasons for this are not far to see. While it costs an average of about Rs 2-3 lakhs for converting an abandoned well into an effective drinking water source, it costs as much as Rs 25-30 lakhs to build a new tube well of a similar capacity. As commissions on an expensive project such as the building of a number of tube wells across the state would run into crores of rupees, policy-makers in the state continued to look only at such projects to solve the problem. Since the resources to fund such projects were often lacking, an effective way of tackling the state's growing needs of drinking water kept getting postponed. However, better sense seems to have prevailed on the current government.