India: Rainwater Harvesting

Summary

Rainwater Center implements rainwater harvesting to relieve charitable insititutions from overhead costs of buying water for inmates.

What is the issue, problem, or challenge?

Chennai is 1 of the 4 metro cities in India. In Chennai there are 100 charitable institutions like orphanages and old age homes that run solely via public donations. They extract ground water to meet the needs of inmates. Due to lack of attempts to sustain the source through rainwater harvesting the wells go dry and they face acute shortage of water for 5 mo./yr. They are forced to buy water at high rates they can’t afford. The inmates of these institutions are the 500 beneficiaries.

How will this project solve this problem?

The project helps charitable institutions collect rainwater falling on their rooftops, in pits to meet immediate requirement on rainy days and also augment ground water sources.

Potential Long Term Impact

To provide self sufficiency in water for institutions. This involves interconnecting rooftop pipes and leading them to sumps and/or existing wells, recharge wells, pits created for this purpose. 25 institutions selected to implement.

Project Message

I've depended on ground water all my life and I wanted to devote the rest of my life to sustain the source via RWH. This project gives me a chance to help the economically weak sustain theirs.
- Dr. Sekhar Raghavan, Director

Additional Documentation

This project has provided additional documentation in a Microsoft Word file (projdoc.doc).

Resources