WHO CARES FOR RAINWATER HARVESTING (Times Of India 23 June 2012)

 

As summer season burns down upon us and the NCR region is in the throes of a water crisis, we need to discuss why we failed to implement rainwater harvesting system to solve the endemic water problem of the capital, and the NCR as a whole. The capital’s water demand is 1,100 million gallons a day (MGD) while the Delhi Jal Board says it provides only around 830 MGD.

Only one councillor in the last body of the unified MCD, out of 272 councillors, undertook a rainwater harvesting project in his area, says GEETA

    As summer season burns down upon us and the NCR region is in the throes of a water crisis, we need to discuss why we failed to implement rainwater harvesting system to solve the endemic water problem of the capital, and the NCR as a whole.

    The capital’s water demand is 1,100 million gallons a day (MGD) while the Delhi Jal Board says it provides only around 830 MGD.

    The problem stems from apathy. The members of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) seem to have hardly spent any funds in ensuring that rainwater harvesting gets underway in their respective wards. The unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi set aside Rs 5 crore in its last budget for the project, to be implemented ward-wise.

    The idea was to create several catchment areas so that the water table could rise in all zones under the civic body. But it turns out that only one councillor out of 272 took up the project in his area.

    “We kept aside Rs 5 crore but the fund couldn’t be utilized by the councillors,” says Subhash Arya of the newly-formed South Delhi Municipal Corporation, who is also the lone councillor who spent about Rs 12 lakh on the installation of four rainwater-harvesting systems in west Delhi’s Subhash Nagar, his ward under the former unified MCD. Arya has now been elected from the Rajouri Garden ward.

    According to Forum of Organized Resource Conservation and Enhancement (Force), an NGO, Delhi receives 900 billion litres of rainfall every year. Experts say that if the MCD’s project had been implemented properly, the capital could have conserved around 300 billion litres of water. All this flowed off into the sewers, leaving the capital parched. This amount of water can recharge the capital’s water table by around 2 metres every year.

    “Delhi doesn’t need to look to Haryana for water. Enough is available within its boundaries,” one expert says.

    “If corporators are spending money on fancy lights in parks when they should have made the rainwater harvesting project their priority, it shows they are in the dark about the city’s needs. But perhaps it is easier to make money with fancy lights,” information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi says. Gandhi had ordered the former unified MCD to erect boards in each ward for funds spent from councillors’ funds in a bid to bring in more transparency.

    The NCR is made up of areas which are parts of the states of Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, besides New Delhi itself. According to a study by S K Sharma and Green Systems, the rapid urbanization of these areas is leading to water being consumed at a pace far greater than its replenishment.

    The NCR covers an area of 33,578 sq km, and according to this report, the urban growth rate was 56.25% during 1991-2001. This area is dependent on groundwater, not only because of inter-state water disputes but also because of high pollution levels in the Yamuna and uneven if not low rainfall.

    There are some traditional water management techniques but these have not been able to resolve the galloping demand for water resulting in over-exploitation of the groundwater.

    “I accept that most of the realty firm failed to implement water harvesting system in their projects. They must understand that unless they opt for rainwater harvesting, they would not able to solve the problem of water in their projects,” Ajay Singal, the director of Avalon Group, says.

    The current groundwater depletion is a classical case of ‘tragedy of the commons’. As there is no resource ownership, and the rules of capture reign supreme, there is no will to conserve it for future use. Thus there has been a steep decline in groundwater in these regions.

    Though there is natural replenishment of groundwater, it has not been able to keep pace with its extraction. There is therefore a need to artificially replenish groundwater through human interventions like rainwater harvesting.

    The NCR may be categorized under sub-regions, each falling under a different state, like the Haryana sub-region, the UP sub-region, etc. Geographically it can be categorized into alluvial plain areas, flood plain areas, structural hills — mostly represented by the Aravalis - and Oxbow lakes and isolated water bodies located in depression.

    Such sub-divisions are of great importance when planning groundwater recharge. The NCR can also be divided into rural and urban areas according to the land use. Such categorization helps in planning division-specific recharge techniques.

    Nuzhat Alim, the director of ILD group, says that realty firms and customers must take responsibility in installing water harvesting systems in their buildings. Ultimately, it is the onus of the residents to make these systems work, as they are the beneficiaries, Alim says.

    The Central Ground Water Board and other agencies have undertaken exploratory drilling in this region. They have found that individual tube-wells drilled to more than 300 metres in the districts along the Ganga and the Yamuna yield more than 150 cubic metres of water per hour.

    The NCR receives between 850 mm of rainfall in the east to 300 mm in the west. There is also a report on the amount of rainfall on cultivable and non-cultivable land. In the kharif season the rainfall over cultivable land is between 352 million cubic metres (MCM)/ year to 2,482 MCM/ year, whereas over non-cultivable land, it ranges from 83.9 MCM/ year to 1,334.7 MCM/ year.

    The built-up area of Delhi receives 344.1 MCM/ year, which can be utilized for rainwater harvesting. In totality the amount of rainfall received for an average year is 22,542 MCM of water of which 16,907 MCM is received in the monsoon season.

    Experts say that this study hardly gets its due from the stakeholders and it is time they sat up and took notice.