by Raveendra Popuri
Part one of this investigation tracked the money. Part two tracks the taps. A district-by-district look at Jal Jeevan Mission progress in Andhra Pradesh shows a state that is not failing evenly — it is failing hardest in the districts around its own new capital, while others finished the job long ago.
Andhra Pradesh has connected 72.11 lakh of its 95.53 lakh rural households to piped water, as of 20 July 2026. That’s 75.48% coverage state-wide, per the Ministry of Jal Shakti’s reply to Parliament. But a single state-wide number hides a sharper story. Four districts have already hit 100%. One district sits at just 37.6%. The gap between AP’s best and worst districts is more than 62 percentage points.
Here’s the finding that cuts deepest: of AP’s five worst-performing districts, four — Palnadu, Bapatla, Krishna and NTR — sit inside the Amaravati capital region. These are not remote, hard-to-reach places. They surround the seat of the state’s own government.
Here is every district in Andhra Pradesh, ranked from worst to best.
Four districts are done. Four more are past 85%. But the bottom five districts alone — Palnadu, Bapatla, Srikakulam, Krishna and NTR — carry 10,33,380 pending connections between them. That’s 44.1% of the entire state’s shortfall, sitting in just five of AP’s 26 districts.
The five worst-performing districts in Andhra Pradesh, by coverage:
- Palnadu — 37.6% covered (62.4% or 2,71,230 households still without a tap connection)
- Bapatla — 42.9% covered (57.1% or 2,08,462 households pending)
- Srikakulam — 44.5% covered (55.5% or 2,97,326 households pending —highest absolute number of any district)
- Krishna — 59.4% covered (40.6% or 1,52,413 households pending)
- NTR — 61.2% covered (38.8% or 1,03,949 households pending)
The five best-performing districts:
- Chittoor, Annamayya, Tirupati, Y.S.R. — 100.0% (fully saturated; Chittoor has just 28 households pending, effectively complete)
- East Godavari — 94.2%
A Tale of Four Regions
Group these districts by region, and the pattern sharpens further. This time, split out the five capital-region districts from the rest of the coastal belt — because lumping them together was hiding the real story.
Once the capital-region districts are pulled out, the rest of coastal AP actually performs well — 83.3%, close to Rayalaseema’s 89.5%. It was Palnadu, Bapatla, Krishna, NTR and Guntur dragging the wider coastal average down. On its own, the Amaravati belt has the worst regional coverage in the state — worse even than North Coastal AP, which borders Odisha and has historically been the region hardest to reach. The capital region is not remote. It is the one place in Andhra Pradesh with no excuse of distance or terrain, and it still trails every other region.
The Capital Region Problem
Here’s a detail worth sitting with. Palnadu, Bapatla, Krishna, NTR and Guntur together form Andhra Pradesh’s new capital region around Amaravati. These are not remote, hard-to-reach districts. They sit at the administrative and political centre of the state. Yet Palnadu is the worst-performing district in Andhra Pradesh. Bapatla is the second-worst. Krishna and NTR sit in the bottom six. Guntur — the district after which the capital zone is best known — trails at 68%, below the state average. Together, this belt of five districts covers barely half its rural households (51.6%), against 89.5% in Rayalaseema.
The government is pouring resources into building a new capital in this belt. Rural households a few kilometres away are still waiting for a tap.
The contrast is stark enough to warrant a direct question to the state’s Panchayat Raj & Rural Water Supply Department: why is JJM coverage weakest exactly where the state’s own flagship infrastructure project is concentrated?
Can Andhra Pradesh Actually Hit Its Own Deadline?
The state government has told the Centre it plans full saturation by June 2028. Its own data suggests that promise needs a serious pace change.
Between August 2019 (30.74 lakh connections) and July 2026 (72.11 lakh connections), AP added roughly 49,843 new connections per month, on average, over 83 months.
To clear the remaining 23.42 lakh connections by June 2028 — 23 months away — AP needs to sustain roughly 1,01,846 connections per month. That is just over double its own historical average pace, sustained without interruption, in a state where drawal of Central funds has fallen to single digits in three of the last four years (see Part 1 of this investigation).
Nothing in the district data suggests this acceleration is already underway. If anything, the worst-performing districts — Palnadu, Bapatla and Srikakulam — need the steepest climb of all, from under 45% to 100%, in the same 23 months as districts that are already nearly done.
Is the State machinery Compounding the Problem?
Part 1 of this investigation established the headline fact: the Centre has released just 12.1% of its sanctioned allocation to Andhra Pradesh over seven years. That kind of non-cooperation from Delhi puts real pressure on state resources — it forces Amaravati to stretch its own budget further than the scheme’s 50:50 design ever intended, just to keep works moving at all.
But that pressure lands unevenly, and district data shows exactly where.
If the worst districts — Palnadu, Bapatla, Srikakulam, Krishna, NTR — were shortchanged on funds relative to the rest of the state, this is a resource-allocation failure. It would mean AP’s own government compounded the Centre’s underfunding by distributing an already-thin pool unevenly, starving its worst-off districts further while better-off districts like Chittoor and Y.S.R. reached saturation.
If these districts received a comparable share of funds and still lag furthest behind, this is an implementation and monitoring failure. It would sit squarely with the state’s Panchayat Raj machinery and the district collectors responsible for execution.
The Centre’s underfunding is real and well documented, and it still doesn’t fully explain why some of Andhra Pradesh’s own districts — sitting at the state’s political and administrative centre — have been left furthest behind.
