Rainwater Harvesting

"Plenty on the roof", is a case study written by Shree Padre in August 2005, of how a district panchayat office in Kerala, used rainwater harvesting not just to overcome shortages in piped supply, but to tap the overhead source, so that no other source was needed.

The Mazhapolima program is quite unique; it aims to (eventually) recharge about 4.5 lakh dug wells in the district, and do this through community awareness and action. It's driven by the District Collector, Mr. Kurian Baby, who strongly advocates sustainable, local development & innovation.

A Gram Panchayat (GP) in Kerala is fairly large, and has a population of approximately 20000 people, as compared to about 10000 in Karnataka, and about 700 in Uttar Pradesh. GP's have ward divisions, about 20 of them per GP. Each GP has a staff of at least 6-8 people. The GP that we visited - Adat, had about 12 employees , 4 lower division clerks, 3 upper division clerks, 1 Joint Secretary, 1 Secretary, 2 peons and 1 sweeper. Except for the peons and the sweeper, the employees are all usually SSLC-pass, but here in Adat they were mostly graduates. For salaries alone, the GP spends about Rs 1.5 lakhs per month. Adat GP executed 124 projects last year. The GP's annual budget was Rs 1.40 crores, not including NREGA funds. Out of this, Rs 40 lakhs was raised by the GP through property taxes etc. Most other parts of the country, GP budgets are only about 5 to 10 lakhs. The Adat GP office was a large 2 storeyed building. Mr Vijayan, the Joint Secretary proudly showed us their awards, which filled up an entire wall.

I was in Bhavnagar - Saurashtra, Gujarat and came across rooftop rainwater harvesting works implemented by (one more than 10 years ago) by Utthan with financial assistance from WASMO, along the same lines as what SACHETANA is attempting . These have strongly withstood the test of time and ALL of the rooftop rainwater tanks I saw (more than 120) were functioning and people were using this water exclusively for drinking and cooking. Here is a proof of concept idea which has withstood the test of time and which is ripe to be taken to areas of high fluoride and arsenic as one possible solution. Even in Gujarat this has unfortunately not happened in the fluoride affected areas at a scale which would benefit people.

Safe Water Network , a not-for-profit dedicated to the development of reliable, sustainable, and scalable water solutions for the world's poor , announced today a partnership with India-based organizations Bhoruka Charitable Trust, the Centre for microFinance, and the Institute of Health Management Research for a rainwater harvesting optimization program in the state of Rajasthan, India. This 18-month initiative expands on a recently completed program that delivered rainwater harvesting systems to 15 villages in the Churu District of Rajasthan. The program supports the development and validation of improvements in three areas: cistern design, water quality, and funding tools. The program also includes the completion of a white paper, which will make policy recommendations specific to Rajasthan. Learnings from the initiative will be shared with others who are working around the world to help the nearly one billion people living in areas of acute water scarcity.

"Megh Pyne Abhiyan" is a network of NGOS that has been working in flood affected areas in Bihar with Arghyam support for the past few years. MPA has been grappling with the idea of providing clean water and sanitation in Bihar.

At the 5th World Water Forum,  Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), was awarded the coveted Kyoto World Water Grand Prize at a glittering closing ceremony to mark the closure of the Forum on World Water Day (March 22) at Istanbul, Turkey. The award was presented to Dr Marcella D'Souza, Executive Director of WOTR in recognition of the outstanding contribution made towards organising rural communities for watershed development and rain water harvesting in an inclusive, equitable, sustainable and gender sensitive manner.

Forwarded to the Portal by: Vishwanath Srikantaiah Image Courtesy: IRCSA The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, Malaysia (NRE) and National Hydraulics Research Institute of Malaysia (NAHRIM) extend a warm invitation t

A series of Press Releases from sources indicate the progress on the matter of the Ganga River Basin Authority. It makes for an informative read with a candid discussion in the comments section!

Ganga River Basin Authority for Comprehensive Management of the Ganga Basin

PIB Friday, February 20, 2009
Ministry of Environment and Forests

 AUTHORITY ENSURES DEVELOPMENT REQUIREMENTS IN SUSTAINABLE MANNER ENSURING ECOLOGICAL FLOWS IN GANGA

The Government today announced the setting up of a National Ganga River Basin Authority. A statement to this effect was made in Parliament by Shri Namo Narain Meena, Minister of State in the Ministry of Environment & Forests. A Notification in this regard is also being issued by the Government.

India Water Portal has a meteorological data tool (https://www.indiawaterportal.org/data/metdata) that gives rainfall data (and 10 other meteorological parameters) for each district of India for 100 years from 1901 to 2002. Over the past couple of years, many many people have expressed that they found this data useful and requested us to enhance it. The data on our meteorological data tool is from a research dataset put out by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the University of East Anglia, UK. The reason we got the data from them, is that IMD, India Meteorological Department, which is the chief source of official meteorological data in India, sells this data. To get the kind of all India data above, would be prohibitively expensive. Further, they would not allow this data to be made publicly available, as they sell the same.