Rain Water Harvesting Blog
Many countries in the world are suffering or facing water shortages due to climate change and we see a massive potential in rainwater harvesting in India and it may make this nation capable of meeting the needs of six to seven times their current populations. We urges governments, builders, contractors, institutions and donors to invest more widely in Rainwater Harvesting technology that is low cost, simple to deploy and maintain and able to transform the lives of households, communities in entire India. Overall the quantity of rain falling across the continent is more than enough for Indian residents; just we need to utilize rain water intelligently. Although not all rainfall can or should be harvested for drinking and agricultural uses, with over a third needed to sustain the wider environment including forests, grasslands and healthy river flows, the harvesting potential is still much more than adequate to meet a significant slice of human needs, the report notes. In our opinion India is not water scared country. The rainfall contribution is more than adequate to meet the needs of the current population several times.
For example most of the states in India would not be categorized as a ‘water stressed regions’ if rainwater harvesting is adopted properly. The water crisis in India is more of an economic problem from lack of investment, and not a matter of physical scarcity. Unlike big dams, which collect and store water over large areas, small-scale rainwater harvesting projects are equally important as it lose less water to evaporation because the rain or run-off is collected locally and can be stored in a variety of ways. We assume that over the coming years we will need a range of measures and technologies related to rainwater harvesting to capture water and strengthen water supplies. Conserving and rehabilitating lakes, wetlands and other freshwater ecosystems will be vital and big dams, if sensibly and sustainably designed and constructed, may be part of the equation too.
Most modern technologies for obtaining drinking water are related to the exploitation of surface water from rivers, streams and lakes, and groundwater from wells and boreholes. However, these sources account for only 40% of total precipitation. It is evident, therefore, that there is considerable scope for the collection of rainwater when it falls, before huge losses occur due to evaporation and transpiration and before it becomes contaminated by natural means or man-made activities. The term ‘rainwater harvesting’ is usually taken to mean the immediate collection of rainwater running off surfaces upon which it has fallen directly. This definition excludes run-off from land watersheds into streams, rivers, lakes, etc. WaterAid is concerned primarily with the provision of clean drinking water; therefore, the rainwater harvesting projects in Dehradun, Haridwar, Rishikesh and Delhi NCR we construct are mainly those where rainwater is collected from roofs and stored for future use and for ground recharging.
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