The Indian landscape has been shaped by a long tradition of sustaining and conserving natural resources, which successfully combined indigenous knowledge with actions for sustainability. This has been seen in the diverse yet synergistic water management practices across the subcontinent, where local communities identified climatic, geo-hydrological, and ecological trends and passed down this knowledge through generations to develop hydraulic systems that allocate freshwater without affecting the rhythms of nature. However, with growth and industrial transformations, water allocation plans have come under immense pressure on freshwater resources, with advanced technologies partitioning rivers into channels and heavily abstracting groundwater for more centralized water supplies and allocation, without consideration of nature and community. This led to decades of social and economic disparity in freshwater management, with limited to no access to drinking water for millions of rural and marginalized groups across the country. The vision of The Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) – Har Ghar Jal, that has been a leading initiative of the Ministry of Jal Shakti since its inception on August 15, 2019, is to ensure “that every rural household has a reliable and regular supply of safe and adequate drinking water through tap connections on a long-term basis, ultimately leading to an improvement in the living standards of rural communities” (DDWS-MoJS, 2019). The JJM's action plan highlights the importance of identifying, strengthening, and augmenting local groundwater and surface water sources as a primary feature for the success of the mission. However, the sustenance of the local water sources cannot be achieved only through modern management practices, which focus more on the judicious distribution of water resources and infrastructural development. Hence, “reviving and integrating traditional water harvesting practices into modern infrastructure frameworks” has been a critical component of local policy integration with the tenets of JJM. This has motivated central agencies like the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) to incorporate source sustainability in groundwater management in four water-stressed states (Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu) through the collection of basic field-level information and assessment of demand and supply components of groundwater, including evaluation of monsoon runoff availability (CGWB, 2023). Moreover, several other examples of the integration of modern data acquisition methods and local water conservation practices also highlight the success stories of modernization of traditional rainwater harvesting systems, including the revival of abandoned stepwells (such as baolis in North India and Kalyanis in parts of Karnataka) as part of municipal stormwater systems; geo-tagging and mapping of traditional structures to monitor water table movements (India Water Portal, 2021) and connecting rural households using water collected from Johad with a network of pipes, thereby creating a resilient closed-loop system. While these advancements in assimilating traditional and modern have given hope to better implementation of the mission nationwide, there are still major challenges to it. The emphasis on providing a consistent drinking water supply to all rural households is expected to create immense pressure on the seamless integration of high-end technologies (Solar submersible pumps, digital SCADA infrastructure, automated chlorination lines, etc.; CARE International & Ministry of Water Resources, 2015) with existing infrastructure, including traditional water harvesting systems. Furthermore, the variability in seasonal water supply and demand would also impact the conventional water allocation practices for irrigation, which might alter the agro-geo-ecological balance that traditional systems like Johad-Khadins (in Rajasthan), Ahar-Pyna (Bihar), and Zabo (Nagaland) are known to sustain. Moreover, other challenges such as Gap in knowledge (including proper impact assessment of Inhospitable terrain, cold/ hot deserts, groundwater sources, in situ geo-genic contamination, fluctuation of water storage due to climate change), identification of cost-effective solutions and innovations, logistic issues (such as lack of continuous monitoring on functioning of tap water connections as well as insufficient water or poor-quality water produced at treatment plant, overflowing of water storage unit, frequent leakages and difficulty in detecting minor leakages, inadequate pressure in pipes), lack of rural infrastructural development as well as capacity building initiatives for proper management and maintenance. have also been identified as a major hurdle in achieving full scale implementation of the JJM (National Jal Jeevan Mission, 2021). While these challenges seem daunting tasks for the stakeholders involved, the success story of JJM could be seen in the fact that access to tap water coverage grew exponentially from 3.23 crore households (16.72%) in 2019 to over 15.82 crore households (81.71%) in 2025, and though the mission will invariably achieve the 100% coverage, the real success of it lies in the long-term source sustenance plans for water resources that could interweave the old knowledge with the new technology and innovation. References: CARE International & Ministry of Water Resources. (2015). Rural water supply community-based management manual: For the sustainable management of rural water points. CARE International Somalia / Ministry of Water Resources. Agenda for Change CGWB (2023). "Source Sustainability for Drinking Water”. Report, Ministry of Jal Shakti, Government of India. Available at: CGWB Official Portal. Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Ministry of Jal Shakti. (2019) Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of Jal Jeevan Mission or Operational Guidelines of Jal Jeevan Mission 2.0, Report, Ministry of Jal Shakti. India Water Portal. (2021). Reviving traditional water harvesting structures. National Jal Jeevan Mission. (2021). 2 years of JJM: Making water everyone's business. Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Ministry of Jal Shakti, Government of India. This article is written by Dr. Utsab Ghosal and Dr. Aditya Sarkar, Assistant Professors, Department of Geology, Presidency University, Kolkata [Published in NIWAS Vartika - Vol-II, Issue-1 (Apr-June '26): A WASH magazine by SPM NIWAS, MoJS, GoI]