Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that piped water will reach all homes in the countryside by 2024, setting a tough target at a time when hundreds of millions don't have access to clean water.

Water is typically scarce in the summer months, but the situation has been particularly grim this year in western and southern states that received below average rainfall in the 2018 monsoon season.

About 200,000 Indians die every year due to inadequate access to safe water, and 600 million face high to extreme water stress, the National Institute for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog said in a report last year, citing data by independent agencies.

CNBC-TV18 spoke with Gopal Jhaveri, co-founder of River March, A river clean-up movement; Hariharan Subramaniam, Editor and co-founder, EverythingAboutWater; Shripad Dharmadhikari, water policy researcher and head of Manthan Adhyayan Kendra in Pune and Arun Krishnamurthy, Environmentalist, to understand why the government, at the centre and state are not waking up to the reality to solve the country's water crisis?