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How rainwater harvesting could have saved Chennai city from the present water crisis?
Posted on: 14/Jun/2019 10:14:51 AM
The failure of monsoons has led to extreme water crisis now in the Chennai city. As a result, the residents are struggling to get water and depend on the water tankers to quench their thirst.
The remarkable information that has come out now is an apartment complex located on Greenways Road has not brought a single tanker load of water in this summer. It is now said that the availability of groundwater combined with better rainwater harvesting techniques have helped the people belonging to this apartment at a time when other apartments people are scrambling for water.
On the apartment premises, de-silting an open well was carried out and recharge wells have been cleaned and these processes have helped these residents amazingly. The important point is the residents are not depending on the tankers and metro water supply etc for the sake of drinking water.
A resident belonging to Greenways Road explained about how groundwater is still available at 20 ft and every day 60,000 litres of water gets drawn to get water supplied to as many as 110 apartments there. He threw light on the harnessing of rainwater and spoke about how harnessing of rainwater was mainly responsible for the availability of water now in his place in this summer. He mentioned about the piped water supply that was stopped 2 months back. In the year 2003, state government made it compulsory to have rainwater harvesting or RWH structures in the buildings.
This has resulted in majority of buildings in Chennai to have the rainwater harvesting structures. It is revealed that many buildings in the urban areas in Chennai do not have their own rainwater harvesting structures just similar to the apartment complex of Greenways Road. The experts have pointed out that wrong RWH methods are present in the buildings or buildings not maintaining the structures at all. Across the Chennai city, there are 8.9 lakh RWH structures in various types of buildings and this was as per the metro water department data.
The important point is not much information is available regarding the maintenance of these RWH structures except for the random checks before northeast monsoon and RWH audit carried out by Rain Centre in suburban areas. Harnessing rain water in June month was very important as the structures would be nearly 100 % efficient as the parched land would absorb more water. This was confirmed by the officials of metro water department.
The official then compared the present water crisis situation with that in 2003 and said present situation is much better. It must be noted that the average ground water level in the city of Chennai has dropped to 7.7 m and is still better than 2003 acute water crisis situation.
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