Rain Water Harvesting

The growing needs of population and urbanisation have generated an urgency to evolve innovative methods for holding up of the ground water resource through appropriate recharge activities. With the gradual depletion of groundwater and altered climatic conditions, Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) is becoming need of the hour.

The availability of water has always been vitally important for all, political stability, health and economic development. Governing the use of water management and its regulation has become more challenging in recent times. There has seen phenomenal growth in human population, the demand for potable water, water demand for domestic, agriculture, recreation and for industry is increasing, but the quantum of water has remained same. Due to recurring droughts insufficient water supply is people resort to augmenting more from ground water sources for all the purposes.  This situation has led to declining groundwater levels and deterioration of water quality.

Therefore the sustainable alternate and decentralized approach is Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) to improve for ground water recharge to improve ground water level and quality to use for agriculture, meet industry needs and Roof top rainwater harvesting for drinking water purposes. Rainwater can be stored in such as ponds, lakes, tanks and dams for direct use or for recharge purposes.

VIKSAT has expertise taken proactive role in Gujarat by promoting Rainwater technology extending its service and in creating awareness through dissemination of information, process documentation of case studies, audiovisuals, capacitating professional and placement students and displaying RWH model in the conference and exhibitions etc. It undertakes research projects and turnkey projects by providing guidance during the implementation. VIKSAT conducted the research studies for the Augmentation of ground water resources by artificial research (AGRAR) during the year 2002-05 in drought prone and groundwater over-exploited region of Satlasana taluq, Mehesana district supported by British geological Survey (BGS) and DFID. The report is published and available for reference.

Institutions / individuals undertaken the services

• Gujarat jalseva training institute (GJTI), Gandhinagar.

• Torrent Pharma at Kalol.

• Torrent Power, Surat.

• Oncology hospital at Ahmedabad.

• GPEC, Bharuch and

• Several individual households in Ahmedabad and Himmatnagar districts.

In Rural areas

• Sargasana, Gandhinagar for ground water recharge.

• Satlasana, Mehsana district for augmentation of ground water through artificial recharge.

• Bhuj, Kutch district recharge of drinking water bore wells.

• Santalpur, Patan district for small farmers by promoting farm ponds and destination tanks to give protective irrigation to the crops.

Dr. Swaminathan released a CD Rom prepared by VIKSAT on "Ensuring Drinking Water Security through Rainwater Harvesting" supported by UNESCO. This multilingual CD is an effort towards generating awareness among the people about sustainable development and use of water focusing on Rainwater Harvesting.

The 20-minute CD attempts to capture the basic concept of rainwater harvesting in a simple way and goes on to show working examples on a variety of building units. The CD also dwells on the potential and scope of rainwater harvesting in the context of decentralized water security at household level. This option assumes greater significance with every passing day in view of the health complications due to degraded water quality-driven and unsustainable bulk supply options. Further, the CD also has an interesting interactive session which helps the user to compute the potential of his house/ flat/ bungalow by oneself.

This is the second audio-visual CD prepared by VIKSAT on Rainwater Harvesting. The first one focused on the potential for augmenting groundwater recharge and thereby reducing the demand-supply gap.