March 22, 2024 • 49 mins
How do we combat water scarcity on one hand and floods on the other? The solution is the same - integrated, inclusive water management, with rainwater harvesting. As citizens and communities, this is a simple, economical and effective practice we can adopt to ensure we have water for our needs, today and in the time to come.
This World Water Day, reimagine the way you think about water. In conversation with Vishwanathan S, founder-trustee Biome Environmental Trust, we discuss the why and how of rainwater harvesting, understand the approach we can take and the design and implementation of rainwater harvesting systems at a home and community level. We address some questions and concerns citizens may have on this journey. Along the way, we reflect on water from the lens of individual, community, need, livelihood, gender, culture, economics, equity, justice, policy, practice and more.
Activity shared by Vishwanath
Go to a nearby lake or well and spend time there; look at the ecology and the livelihoods. Participate in a cleanup activity. You will start to build a sense of ownership with the water body.
Biome Environmental Trust, a thoughtful do-tank based in Bengaluru, is doing phenomenal work with ecological architecture, water management and community engagement. Through their multi-stakeholder approach, they bridge the gap between practice and policy, driving real change in land use and water management. Their Million Wells campaign was awarded the Transformative Cities Award in 2022.
Visit biometrust.org and urbanwaters.in for contacts, case studies, comics and resources on water management and communicating with people about water.
Follow @biometrust
Vishwanath S is the founder of Rainwater Club, Director of Biome Environmental Solutions, and Trustee of Biome Environmental Trust. He is a Civil Engineer from Mysore University and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from CEPT, Ahmedabad. He holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Urban Environmental Management from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. A member of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, he is also an Ex-Secretary General of the International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at Azim Premji University, and has been a columnist at the Hindu since May 2007 (‘Waterwise’ in Property Plus on Saturdays).
Connect with Vishwanath - @zenrainman
Connect with GoGreenGuru - @gogreenguruss or contact@gogreenguru.com
Connect with host Ananya Sangameshwar - @ananyagscreations
Additional resource for understanding groundwater patterns and aquifers across India - https://cgwb.gov.in/
This World Water Day, reimagine the way you think about water. In conversation with Vishwanathan S, founder-trustee Biome Environmental Trust, we discuss the why and how of rainwater harvesting, understand the approach we can take and the design and implementation of rainwater harvesting systems at a home and community level. We address some questions and concerns citizens may have on this journey. Along the way, we reflect on water from the lens of individual, community, need, livelihood, gender, culture, economics, equity, justice, policy, practice and more.
Activity shared by Vishwanath
Go to a nearby lake or well and spend time there; look at the ecology and the livelihoods. Participate in a cleanup activity. You will start to build a sense of ownership with the water body.
Biome Environmental Trust, a thoughtful do-tank based in Bengaluru, is doing phenomenal work with ecological architecture, water management and community engagement. Through their multi-stakeholder approach, they bridge the gap between practice and policy, driving real change in land use and water management. Their Million Wells campaign was awarded the Transformative Cities Award in 2022.
Visit biometrust.org and urbanwaters.in for contacts, case studies, comics and resources on water management and communicating with people about water.
Follow @biometrust
Vishwanath S is the founder of Rainwater Club, Director of Biome Environmental Solutions, and Trustee of Biome Environmental Trust. He is a Civil Engineer from Mysore University and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from CEPT, Ahmedabad. He holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Urban Environmental Management from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. A member of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, he is also an Ex-Secretary General of the International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at Azim Premji University, and has been a columnist at the Hindu since May 2007 (‘Waterwise’ in Property Plus on Saturdays).
Connect with Vishwanath - @zenrainman
Connect with GoGreenGuru - @gogreenguruss or contact@gogreenguru.com
Connect with host Ananya Sangameshwar - @ananyagscreations
Additional resource for understanding groundwater patterns and aquifers across India - https://cgwb.gov.in/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Instead of competing with each other to finish off the groundwater,
(00:03):
if we together come and then fill the aquifer, both of us have water.
The rain that will lead off into the to the drains or to the road from your house causes floods.
So if you want floods to be prevented, you should harvest rainwater.
Two, the water that you depend from your bore well or open well comes from rain water alone which goes into the aquifer.
(00:25):
So if you recharge your aquifer or store water, you're going to solve your water shortage problem.
These are the two reasons why citizens should get involved with rainwater harvesting, because water is becoming scarcer and scarcer.
It's a one-time investment
and a lifetime of collection. When you pour water and you see the earth drinking it,
ghatta ghatta ghatta as they say in Kannada,
It's a fantastic feeling because you're slaking the thirst of Mother Earth, right?
(00:49):
And when you do it enough, the well fills up with water.
You understand, "Oh, this is the place where water seems to infiltrate well". Just as a matter of example,
old termite mounds or trees which are green in the summer show areas where you can put the water in.
Understand where the soil is most spongy, make sure that it is more sandy and make sure that it goes in. That's the recharge zone.
But, we have to make a beginning.
(01:11):
And the beginning is a drum or a bucket below a rain spout.
That's rainwater harvesting at its simplest.
Welcome to GoGreenGuru (01:19):
Sustainability in Action.
I'm your host Ananya Sangameshwar and today we're diving deep into something that's so precious and integral to our lives.
Water.
We take it for granted, right?
But today, Bengaluru and several cities in India are facing the threat of a water crisis.
(01:47):
But it's time we work in synergy with water.
We have a very simple yet effective practice that each of us can adopt to build water resilience, rainwater harvesting.
We have a guest today, Vishwanathmi Sir, Director of Biome Environmental Solutions and Founder Trustee, Biome Environmental Trust.
(02:12):
Biome is doing phenomenal work in ecological design and water management with the focus on community and collaboration.
Their work has won them accolades, including the transformative cities award.
We delve into the why and how of rain water harvesting.
(02:33):
Look at how we can approach designing and implementing the whole system in our homes and communities.
And address some of the questions and challenges in their face as citizens on this journey.
Not just that, we re-imagine the way we look at water itself.
So tune in to this episode if you'd like to feel empowered to build water resilience.
(02:58):
A very warm welcome to GoGreenGuru, Sir, how are you doing?
I'm very good, Ananya and hope you're doing good too.
Thank you so much. I'm doing amazing and I'm really excited for learning more about rain water harvesting, learning about the work of biome.
(03:19):
It's really an inspiring journey and I'm sure you have a lot of wisdom and interesting stories to share. So I'm really looking forward.
I'm not sure about the wisdom part but definitely the experience I'm happy to share that.
Absolutely.
So to start off with, I'd love to know a story of your relationship with water. How has that evolved over time?
(03:42):
Well, I studied to be a civil engineer and as part of civil engineering, hydrology was one of the courses that we were taught.
And we were lucky to have a very good professor who conveyed the idea of hydrology very nicely.
And one got perhaps as interested as one could get as a college student in water. Later on I finished urban planning from the school of planning and the birth where I started to understand water in its context of a city or the region.
(04:10):
And finally when I started to work with the housing and urban development corporation, I was looking at housing projects and urban infrastructure projects which gave me a close contact with water, especially how communities interact with water.
And even as early as the late 80s, one could see that water was a crisis.
(04:30):
And so when I was building my house, I saw that it was raining at one point of time. Me and Jithrao was my, was an architect, I was my wife.
Both of us were standing in the house and it was raining. We were buying water from a tanker and we thought, "Ay, something wrong here. Why should rain water be wasted and why should we be paying for tanker water?"
So we then decided to start to work on harvesting rain water, learning more about the relationship of local waters with our lives and how we can engage with it in a meaningful fashion.
(04:58):
Yeah, that's a beautiful sharing, how you actually observe your surroundings, observe your house and you saw what's really happening there.
And you try to bring changes to really harness the rain water which was right there, which were getting wasted earlier.
So then how did this lead to a Biome? How did you, why and how did you start biome? What should rain with that?
(05:23):
So that, this was the day of the web was coming into place, right? We didn't have the internet, an onion when I started my career as an engineer, urban planner.
So as the net was coming, we got really excited about the possibilities of sharing knowledge and learning from, from all across the globe.
So we started a website called rainwaterclub.org and we thought that the virtual world would be a world where we could not have to register your company, you could just be a knowledge management, confer hub and a knowledge learning hub.
(05:55):
So I started to track rainfall patterns, daily rainfall data, which I used to get from the Indian Meteorological Department, try to find out how much water actually falls on a particular area on a city.
And then to device excel sheet based files to calculate how much rain could be harvested. So when I learned that in Bangalore from 100 square meter roof area, you could actually harvest about a lack of liters of rainwater.
(06:20):
That was sort of mind blowing. So then you thought, hey, why are we wasting all this resource? Why don't we check and make sure that the quality is good and that we could capture it?
So we started as rainwaterclub.org in, I think the late 90s, then we had to formally become biometrast, somewhere along the line because if you want to run NGO civil society group, you have to confirm to the financial norms of the country to be registered biometrast.
(06:47):
And it's been a great journey because there have been excellent people who come in as my colleagues and who have contributed a lot to the knowledge that we have created and the experience that we've got from the field and what we've been able to implement on the ground.
So good people around you, great people around you and great ideas in times of a societal need is where the rainwater club in biome started.
(07:09):
What have you learned along the way?
So any crisis with a natural resource or any issue of managing a natural resource in Rohingya, Nilek and his words, words, involves Samaj, Sargarh and Bazaar.
Many society, that's the us people, Sargarh which is the state and its institutions, Bazaar has in the market, service providers who provide services and other products around it.
(07:33):
So what we've been doing is to weigh on one too much and let the other two become bit players.
What I've learnt is that if we have a balance between all three, then great solutions are possible but at the heart of it is the community. If individuals and communities are not feeling that they need to be a part of the solution or work with it, then it's very difficult for either the state to have sustainable solutions or for the market to provide affordable solutions.
(08:02):
The market will generally leave out the poor, the state will be inefficient and will also leave out quite a set of people. But if we work with communities, then it's possible to retain local waters, developing understanding of local waters and be able to supplement the work of the state as well as the market and be self sufficient to allow the extent.
(08:24):
That's been my broad learning. The other final point that I want to make is that we should see water from a societal lens. Water is not just a physical product, it's a social product, it's a social construct.
We've done many discriminations around water and we've also done a lot of bad distribution around water. We should avoid that, we should make sure that water is accessible for all.
(08:47):
Even with GoGreenGuru, what we are trying to do is we are focusing on the community, on the people, how can we as such as citizens, take charge of the whole thing and really understand the nuances and the context.
Today there's the water crisis which is happening in Bangalore and in many urban places in India. So what have you learnt about the water crisis and why, what are the challenges really and why should, why should we care about it?
(09:18):
We are in the head of climate change, global warming, 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, the hydrological cycle is being affected but it's also affecting itself on a layer which is already very bad and we're at least speaking right.
We are destroying old growth forests, the western guards, the hub of our rivers are being destroyed as we speak. Local lakes and rivers are being polluted or are being consumed by real estate, construction debris going to water bodies.
(09:46):
We are not engaging enough to make sure that aquifers are recharged, right. We don't understand recharged zones and push water into groundwater, we're a ground water civilization.
So it's a complex case of neglect and an overconsumption of resources and a lack of attention to pollution. This is being the reason why water is becoming increasingly scarce and difficult for people to access.
(10:10):
And as you unravel this problem as you research more about it over time. So what have you discovered as the solution? So like what can be as of course there are many things to be done at a systemic level but then as citizens or at a community level, what all is possible today?
So let's talk about two contexts where I've been working on one is the rural context of the tank ecosystem. You know we have carries as we call in Canada these are human made water bodies by throwing a band across a valley, right.
(10:44):
This was done a thousand years back, a thousand to one hundred years back, some of them 500 to 600 years back. But this these tank ecosystem was the hub of water for the village for a long, long time.
But they were created during a feudal time when aristocracy was in place when they were polygons and kings and such. Now we are in a democracy.
So in a democracy, how should then old historical ecosystem like a tank function? Some learnings if water comes to a tank in a village who benefits.
(11:14):
Usually it's those who have the land, the more land you have, the more you benefit from the water because you can get one crop, two crops or three crops.
But if you don't have land, how does water matter to you? At best it may give you some bit of drinking water but anyway the government is giving you the drinking water.
So how do you make sure that there's equal access societally to that water of the tank which is a rainwater harvesting system, right.
(11:39):
That what we've learned is then you involve the land less, especially the women as part of the solution.
And you make sure that they are engaged right from the beginning with the share of the pie, the pie being the water that comes.
So they clean up the feeder channels, the distribution channels, make the ecosystem robust so that everybody has access to water.
But in turn, the village promises to keep, let's say one third of the water for goats and sheep.
(12:05):
The land is people generally have goats and sheep so therefore they are able to make a living out of the waters in the tank.
Another thing that can be done is that the fishing rights of the water body can go to women self-help groups, especially to people who don't own land.
So therefore you have to negotiate the benefits of water in a just and equitable manner so that everybody gains, not that somebody gains.
(12:28):
So remember water is not just an environmental construct or a physical construct, it's a social construct, right. It's a societal construct.
And so therefore you have to work on the social construct to regenerate the ecological construct and the physical construct.
That's one thing in the village context. In the urban areas take a city like Bangalore. Bangalore had a lot of lakes and tanks, but necessarily had to go to the Arikavati in the Kavari river to bring water from far because in the era of drought in the years of drought,
(12:57):
like if you are continues to or three years of drought, the tanks were insufficient to provide water to people.
Modern human beings need 135 liters per capita per day or at least a bare minimum 100 liters per capita per day, right. 100 liters per percent per day.
The tanks and the lakes are not sufficient to give that 100 liters per percent per day.
So therefore we have to combine the tanks as a supplement and bring water from the river, but we have to make sure that it is universally accessible.
(13:24):
Piped water should reach everybody, some water for all, not all water for some, right. That's the way we have to think.
Plus we have to think about what we call integrated urban water management.
Meaning we must think of rainwater as a resource, we must think of groundwater as a resource, surface water, lakes, rivers and streams as a resource, pipe water from the river as a resource and finally,
(13:46):
wastewater or treated wastewater as a resource. If we plan including all these five, then we have substantially enough resource to manage ourselves.
But if we plan in silos, only look at one or the other, then we will run out of water because there's no resource.
But all the planning with all the forms of water has to be universal access.
Everybody should get their fair share of water as a human right and later on as an economic goal.
(14:12):
50 liters per person per day for example free because it's a human right. But the 51st liter to be charged so that you conserve water and that you make sure that the institution for institution providing the water has the money to invest in extending the infrastructure keeping the network going, right.
So these are the two things that I learned, societal concerns and universal access.
(14:34):
We have very valid points. So essentially we look at water as an ecosystem. We can see it today as well, like how we have a lot of water, we have enough rainwater coming in but most of it.
But we are still facing a scarcity of water, we take water from many kilometers away and at the same time we see our streets flooded during any heavy rains.
(15:01):
So there is some kind of paradox happening there. So when we look at water in this terms of design in terms of an overall design, I think we can work on mitigating this.
Exactly. As you rightly point out floods and droughts are the common cause for both floods and droughts are the same mismanagement of rainwater.
(15:25):
If you mismanage rains when they fall, they cause floods. And if you mismanage rains when they're actually falling, you can cause a drought.
The same water, if it's stored in a lake or a pond or in the aquifer below when it is raining heavily will become drought-proofing solutions for us in the summer months, right, or in the dry season.
(15:46):
So both of them have the same cause and that's what a harvesting that is the solution for both floods and droughts.
Let's dig a bit deeper into what a harvesting. So how do you demystify what a harvesting? Now we are not, we've all heard of it, but we're like, what is it really?
How do you really explain this to a lay person?
(16:07):
Well, at its simplest, let's say rain is falling on the rooftop, just put a drum below the pipe which brings the water down from the rooftop and you're rainwater harvesting.
You can collect the water, you can use it for your plants or pots or for washing your garden or water in your garden or washing your dried areas.
So that's the rainwater harvesting. It's as simple as that, a drum below the rain's power.
(16:29):
Once you start, it's always the starting trouble that we have, you know, we think of it as a theoretical exercise, then we don't move, but just put that bucket or the drum below the rain pipe and you've started with rainwater harvesting.
Then you'll start to understand how much volume of water is falling and use, when the bucket overflows or the drum overflows, oh, you say it's as a waste, right?
Because you're starting to collect, if you don't collect everything is a waste, but you don't mind, but when you start to collect, overflow is a waste.
(16:55):
Then you make bigger drums, you start to understand how the rainfall pattern is, what is the quality of rainwater? What can I do to store it?
Can I recharge it into the ground? So for example, recharging means a small pit in the ground, which you put water in and let it infiltrate into the ground.
That can become a recharge well, which is usually three feet in diameter and twenty feet deep in the Bangalore context.
(17:16):
So when you pour water and you see the earth drinking it, got it, got it, got it, got it, it's a fantastic feeling because you're slaking the thirst of mother earth, right?
And when you do it enough, the well fills up with water. Then you can start to draw it.
And the compact that we have between the rain and earth and the soil and we're privileged to be part of the solution making space.
But we have to make a beginning and the beginning is a drum or a bucket below a rain's power. That's rainwater harvesting at its simplest.
(17:45):
I love how you started with that simple step because we get over and over we need to design the whole system into consultations.
Of course, all that comes but then this is the starting point.
You don't have to consult an expert, it's so simple and you don't have to think of all my roof, I want to harvest, I need a large sum.
No, just even a hundred needed drum will fill up 60 times if you use it every time because it rains 60 days in a year in Bangalore.
(18:13):
So a hundred liter drum into 60, 6000 liters of water, right?
For our use. So that's the way we must begin and not let it overwhelm us with its complexities.
Thank you for breaking it down into that simple way.
Taking that simple step will not be a problem for us.
That will be a good starting point.
(18:35):
And one of the other things you can do on an air is to buy a rain gauge.
You can make your own rain gauge or can buy a rain gauge for as low as 700 or 800 rupees these days.
If you make it yourself it won't cost you more than 20 rupees with a pet bottle.
Just place a rain gauge and start to measure rain every day, right?
Whenever it rains, you will be astounded at the number that starts to come to you and then you'll start to think,
(18:58):
"Oh my God, how much water am I wasting with the rain gauge?"
So rain gauge is a good beginning.
So now let's look at it from the point of view of citizens.
Maybe they're different concerns people have or they're different things they want to understand about it.
Maybe I'll ask some questions on the point of view of a citizen who's unfamiliar with this idea and we can go from there.
(19:23):
So say, I must say, "Doesn't why I should actually do rain water harvesting? What's the purpose?
Why is it my problem or my response?"
Why is it my problem?
So two reasons.
One, the rain that you'll let off into the trains or to the road from your house causes floods.
So if you want floods to be prevented, you should harvest rain water.
(19:47):
Two, the water that you depend from your bore well or open well comes from rain water alone which goes into the aquifer.
So if you recharge your aquifer or store water, you're going to solve your water shortage problem.
These are the two reasons why citizens should get involved with rain water harvesting
because water is becoming scarcer and scarcer in this world of hours.
(20:08):
And it's becoming costly like people are finding in Bangalore that when you buy tanker water, it's now astronomical figures.
150 rupees and 1000 liters, 200 rupees and 1000 liters.
That's an enormous amount of money that you have to pay.
But if everybody does rain water harvesting, starting with us, then we won't have this problem at all of water shortages.
That's why we must do rain water harvesting.
(20:30):
Absolutely.
And then let's look at it from a monetary point of view as well.
So let's compare, say in one household, if we go things the normal road, maybe we get pipe water from the municipal supply,
maybe we dig bore wells for getting more water or maybe we get some water tankers or then finally we need to filter our water as well for drinking.
(20:59):
So all of that leads to some expenses.
So that versus if we have, if we follow rain water harvesting, what would the expenses compare like?
So yes, the thing, if you're building a new house or a new apartment, rain water harvesting will not cost you anything at all.
Because usually people in Bangalore and many other cities build large sometime to store pipe water from the network or when we buy from tankers,
(21:25):
or they have drilled a bore well already right?
People have a, have a roof on their heads and that roof needs downpipes to bring all the rain water down.
So everything is done.
The roof is there, the catchment, the pipes which bring it down, the storage or the structure which will receive recharge water.
All you need to invest in is a filter.
If you put in a filter, you're then able to harvest all the roof covering water.
(21:48):
Only smart thing to do, make sure that the downpipes are in the direction of the sunk tank or the direction of the well.
Just slope the roof that way, put a filter and you harvest it.
So it will cost you something like 5,000 rupees or 7,000 rupees.
When you're spending 80 lakhs, 60 lakhs, 50 lakhs on your house, 5,000 rupees is 1% or less right?
So it really doesn't cost you anything at all if you're smart in the new house.
(22:10):
So in the new house, there's no reason at all why you shouldn't do rain water harvesting on the basis of cost.
Let's take an old house when you have to retrofare.
Again, think smart as I was talking to you before.
Don't think of capturing the whole roof.
Just capture the pipe nearest to the sunk tank.
There will always be one downpipe nearest to the sunk tank.
Stick a filter, leave it to your existing sunk tank or a well that you have.
Again, the cost would not be more than 5,000 to 7,000 rupees.
(22:34):
Yes, you will not collect all the roof, rain water.
But once you make a beginning, you'll start to then invest in phases overcoming the cost barrier and collect it.
I, for example, pick up rain water from the state case roof.
The state case roof in every home is slightly at an elevated place.
It's a clean catchment because nobody ever walks on it.
That water I use only for drinking and cooking.
(22:56):
Now, if I were to substitute that water by buying water for drinking and cooking,
I'd pay 5 rupees for 20 liters from an aroplant.
I have to go to the aroplant and buy it and bring it.
If I buy it as bottled water, which is 20 rupees for a liter, right?
So here's all the years drinking and cooking water, which comes from rain water for free.
Once I've put in that 500 liter HDB tank, the storage, right?
(23:19):
A classic term to store it.
So it depends on which water you want to substitute.
If you substitute your drinking and cooking water, your return on investment is almost six months.
Within that, you recover your money.
Then by beginning small and doing it when your house is being built,
you reduce the cost and make sure that the water is on it.
Finally, remember one thing with rain water harvesting.
It's a one-time investment.
(23:41):
And a lifetime of collection.
All that you need to do over the lifetime of the structure is just to keep cleaning the filter down in there.
And it's a very easy task.
It takes no more than five minutes, especially it has to be done after with any day.
So single investment, 25 years of rain water collection.
That's the beauty of the system.
If you look at digging water, what about that expense?
(24:02):
But it's a one-time expense without any guarantee because you may not strike water, right?
So people now, for example, in Bangalore, are drilling to 1400 feet,
spending four lakh to five lakh rupees.
And maybe you don't get any water at all after spending five lakhs.
The same five lakhs, if we built a large 50,000 liter sometime,
you'd be assured of all the year-round supply from your rooftop.
That's very true.
(24:23):
So the board will, when we dig also, with more time, there is less guarantee.
But with rain water harvesting, there is no fluctuation.
Exactly.
So what happens is in competitive drilling, your neighbor drills a bore well 600 feet,
you drill 800 feet, per chap's bore well goes dry, he then goes a thousand feet,
your bore well goes dry.
So it becomes competitive consumption, whereas we need cooperative refilling,
(24:48):
right?
Instead of competing with each other to finish off the groundwater, repeat.
Together come and then fill the aquifer, both of us have water.
So I'll tell you the example of a gated community,
they're the band-aid individual bore wells.
And they made rain water harvesting and recharge band-aid tree.
360 sites were there, all 360 houses, recharge the aquifer,
(25:09):
and only three bore wells were allowed, right?
So everybody is participating in recharging the aquifer,
but community is drawing water from three bore wells and supplying it,
putting a meter and saying we will not use more than 20,000 liter someone.
So therefore, there is self-sustinance.
Imagine the scenario otherwise.
All 360 of them would have sunk bore wells, one after the other,
(25:31):
two lakh rupees per bore well, even if we imagine that cheaper cost,
it's 7.2 crore rupees in sinking bore wells which will all go dry.
Whereas if you do the rain water harvesting,
it only costs 50,000 rupees to do a recharge structure.
Not only are you saving money, but you're making sure that water becomes
sustainably available for you.
So we have to think of ourselves as a community rather than an individual
(25:54):
competing with the community. We have to think of ourselves working together to solve the problem.
That's a really, really, really important perspective,
looking at it as a community resource, rather than just for an individual.
Because when we actually share and contribute together,
we get much more benefits together and once left behind.
And there's one very interesting example that we had with open wells that we revive recently.
(26:19):
The women of the community came and said, don't put a pump.
If you put a pump, we will waste the water or it will go to the apartments nearby
and the well will go dry. We will go to the well and say the five,
you know, draw the water from the pulley and use the water ourselves.
We need no more than four parts in a day and all of us will go to the water and try it.
So even now in this peak summer in Bangalore,
there's still water in an open well.
(26:41):
And the women are getting water from the open well for their use.
So demand management, understanding how much can the earth provide
and staying within those limits of the earth's provision is crucial.
And who brought the knowledge, the women who actually lift the water from the well.
So listen to the community, especially listen to women in the community
because they are the key bearers of water and take their advice and making sure
(27:02):
whatever the more harvesting systems we design are designed for them and with them
because they are the water ministers.
Yeah, gender play has a really important connection with water.
Women have that understanding that.
And you live in close proximity to nature or to our resources when we actually look,
(27:23):
look and understand, look and observe.
Then it really helps us use it better.
So I don't want to stereotype, but men think of large infrastructure projects,
build an over-retank, build a bore well, put pipes and pumps and move things around,
spend tons of money. Whereas women think of how do I get water at my house.
And that's a different lens altogether.
When you say, I'm not bothered about the large infrastructure, I want water for my needs near my house.
(27:49):
The answers are different as solutions.
Suppose I invest in water harvesting structure now in my house.
So how long does it take for me to see the results or maybe get water or recharge back with fur?
The first trend will give you water.
The ideal combination is one of storage and recharge, right? You store some and you push the other into the aquifer.
(28:15):
The very first trend will give you the benefits.
It will start from day one.
Suppose you're doing your rainbow harvesting in the month of April.
The April showers and may showers themselves to start to bless you with water.
When water is the most scarce and critical and crucial, you'll be able to get those waters and then start to use it.
And obviously during the rainy season, you'll have plenty of water, August September October, November.
(28:36):
These four months are abundant rains, so we'll benefit a lot from it.
So we collect some in a tank and then we do some purification system and we can use that for drinking, cooking purposes and other...
Keep the roof clean.
Keep the roof clean so that there's no leaves or anything on it, right? Dust it with the broom.
(28:57):
Make sure you have a filter, a good filter and then collect it in the sand tank.
So then the water is very good. If you find any problems, you can use a bit of chlorine tablets, one or two chlorine tablets to disinfect the water.
If you think that the water is bad, right? And then you can use it directly.
So it's as simple as that. You don't need any filtration post storage.
You don't need anything at all. Just chlorine tablets will help.
(29:19):
You get this beautiful H2S Y and testing kits. These are small bottles where you can put a bit of the water and check for bacteria.
In 36 hours, if it goes black, there's E-coli in it, so then you put the chlorine tablets.
It doesn't glow back. You don't even have to put the chlorine tablets. It's good to go.
How do we approach the whole designing of the system?
How do we understand my context and build the whole system accordingly?
(29:46):
So one thing to do is to get data on the rainfall in your locality.
How much does it rain in a year? That gives you the total volume of rain water that can harvest.
The second is to study the number of rainy days. How many days it does it rain? And which month does it rain?
So that's the distribution. So when you understand the distribution, you optimize your storage system for that distribution.
(30:08):
Don't build a huge tank to store all the water in the beginning.
Just build a small tank, store the water, and allow the overflow to reach as well.
Put it in into the ground.
So optimize your storage system based on the rainfall pattern in your area.
However, in many waterscares areas, perhaps you will have to build a large tank because that will be the only water that you get for drinking and cooking.
(30:32):
That will be the only water. Like in Gujarat or Rajasthan, that may be the size.
But in urban areas, rain water is usually a supplement to all other waters. And supplement means that you need to build a small tank.
So we understand our rainfall patterns and then also see our roof size and then do the bottom.
And then you multiply it by that. That's a coefficient of runoff.
Calculate what is the runoff for each rain and then optimize your design on what you feel comfortable.
(30:56):
Usually, let's say a thousand liter tank will fill up 60 times. A six thousand liter tank will fill up maybe 20 times alone.
So it depends on what you're comfortable with with your budget and you then put that tank.
But begin with once you put that in system in place, then you can automatically expand it when you want.
So this is for an independent house context. And then also how do we check if we're doing it the correct way.
(31:24):
How do we understand it which is effective doing audit, doing all of that.
So one of the things is to figure out from your neighbors, somebody of the other would have done rainbow harvesting.
To pick the nearest neighbor that you think was rainbow harvesting and find out and ask them.
They'll be able to give you very good advice. Don't go very far.
In the city of Bangalore, if you're here, we have a rainbow harvesting theme park. In Chennai, there's a rain center.
(31:46):
You can go to this theme park or rain center and get a lot of advice on how to manage and make it the system.
There are many websites which give you information on those and don't support rainbow harvesting. So do that.
But hey, try it. If you fail, you will learn and you will improve. It's not going to kill you, right?
You'll only maybe have a leaking pipe or a leak somewhere in your sometime or somewhere near the filter or something, but there's nothing that you can't fix it.
(32:12):
Don't think that you can do everything full proof in one go.
I've had flooding from my rooftop into my basement at one point of time because I did a stupid thing of trying to filter it at the roof level itself.
But that teaches you a lesson and then you improve. Approach it with the with with humility and a sense of learning.
And then as you go along, you get better at it. And it's not rocket science. You'll fix it within a month.
(32:38):
Yeah, you learn as you go. Absolutely. Make mistakes. The world is made to make mistakes.
And then what about at a community level? How do we go about it?
So like I said, cooperation is the way to go. So what we need to do if you want to recharge the aquifer is to identify what we call recharge zones.
(32:59):
These are areas where the water percolates into the earth and gets into the aquifer fast.
And there are discharge zones where the water comes up at the groundwater table and you can draw the water from either open wells or boroughs or shallow filter boroughs or deep boroughs.
Right. So with the community, map the geology of the place, take the help of a professional if you want to and make sure that you understand these recharge and discharge zones.
(33:21):
But do so in a spirit of sharing where everybody recharges, but there's only community draw and sharing of the waters that have been so recharged.
Don't go for private more well to draw the water out and private recharge that maybe the individual thing that to do if you don't have a sense of community, but at a community level, it gets more effective.
Get a larger area together and you share it together. Absolutely.
(33:45):
Because then you have roads and open spaces and parks also becoming available to you. All these are recharge zones, not just your site or building, all these common areas and common facilities and in apartments, the great, the strong water drains become great places for recharge.
So identify every one of the places where you can put the water in. Make sure that it's not polluted, right.
Make sure that there's no rosy, make sure that there's no solid base being dumped there. No oil and grease there that in the catchment and then make sure that it goes through a filtration process before it reaches the aquifer.
(34:14):
Or before it is stored. So how do we understand the context of our region? Like how do we understand what is a recharge zone, the start phone, that up to naturally.
So it's a water literacy that we have to once we are familiar with this term, Google it, you'll figure out what it means and there'll be a lot of other information available to you.
(34:35):
And it's simple common sense if you ask a traditional well digger in our place of somebody with the common sense you you understand, oh this is the place but what seems to be right.
Just as a matter of example, old termite mountains or trees which have which are green in summer show areas where you can put the water easily.
Yeah, so look at the landscape of its sandy soil, then it reaches as well if it's clay soil, it won't go in fast. If it's hard rock, it won't go in obviously.
(35:03):
So understand where the soil is more spongy, make sure that it's more sandy and make sure that it goes in that's the recharge zone, that's the way you're to.
Hill tops recharge zones, valleys, discharge zones, normal understanding. So that's you learn as you go along.
And if the land is sloping in a certain way, so the bottom of the slope is where we let water work lit inside the top.
(35:30):
So it's called the reach valley approach, you put the water in at the top and you draw it from the bottom.
Okay, got it. We understand the layer of the land and then that you will get a closer to nature.
And then you understand the rock layer below, sometimes the land itself may not be talking to the rock layer below or the clay layer below, so you have to understand the top of the surface of the land as well as what is below the soil.
(35:57):
So we dig an experiment in that way.
You have a history like if you have old wells, which have been around for a long time, which are water, that's the discharge zone, that's where you'll get the water.
If you have drilled bore wells, you know what is the depth of the casing, which tells you the weathered zone, right?
So there's a lot of other signals that you can pick up.
How do we do it on a rooftop in a community level as well?
(36:18):
How do we go to that?
So at a community level, every rooftop is something that is private generally or there's a common clubhouse or common feature there, right?
Or a school, for example, in a community, get a community.
So there you, the rooftop rainbow harvesting system remains the same.
You pick all the water, bring it down, down pipes, filter it and store it and access, put it into the ground.
(36:41):
Right? So that's that's the charge.
So you do that there at that scale.
But at a community level, like I keep telling you, your roads and storm water drains are for you, the potential for more recharge.
So you do it there also.
Make the recharge wells and recharge weights in the storm drains and all of the water to infiltrate.
Yeah, make the best use of the possible resources.
Yeah, divide the land into rooftops, paved surfaces and unpaved surfaces.
(37:05):
Root tops are generally the cleanest water so you can collect it.
There may be a bit of pollution and dust, so you need to biologically filter it through swells and green filters.
Then unpaved surfaces by denser are allowing recharge.
Make sure that you have it as a as a valley or a draft for a swell so that water torqually stops.
Three roof pave unpaved.
(37:27):
So how do we actually go about convincing people are getting the community along to practice it?
There are a few good people to begin with.
You start with 5 or 10 volunteers who come forward and work volunteering and then it's a slow process of negotiation and explaining the benefits and demonstrating it through those initial pilot structures that you do.
(37:50):
And in general, most people are convinced over some period of time start with the early movers.
They will be the first to put in the money and do the stuff.
Then talk a lot about it.
Allow the message to go to everybody.
If you have more and more people and once you cross a threshold then everybody joins it.
But what was ready to start off?
Correct.
People light and have them but don't impose your ideas and values.
(38:12):
Don't go about being a proselytizer or an evangelist for rainwater harvesting.
Get the message in slowly.
Don't make yourself a new sense for other people with your wonderful idea.
Just be gently persuasive.
Keep showing and demonstrating and saying what's happening and then people come on board.
So how do you pitch it to your IWAs as well?
Just show examples of other RWA's.
(38:34):
Just show examples.
Take them to one of the things that I noticed is if you go see what an RWA is done.
Then observe what is there.
Then it really makes a difference to you.
Rather than any power point or any amount of talking, seeing is believing.
And absolutely seeing and working is believing.
And when RWA is talked to other RWA's and understand the problems of the system also, how to deal with it.
(38:57):
That's a very powerful word.
Hello, I think from people who have done it.
From communities who have done it.
Exactly.
Great way.
And I think in the bio or the urban waters side, they are resources on how to convince people.
Yeah, we made comic books.
We made examples.
We highlighted the work of people and a lot of case studies are available for you.
(39:20):
And there are contact numbers where you can phone people and find out from them.
Well diggers are listed, plumbers are listed, books are made available, brochures are made available.
We are learning platform for everybody to tap in and get what they want.
These days, there's a solid amount of volunteering that many, many communities do.
And many people do with solid base, for example, or with lakes, for example, or parks or dogs like that.
(39:43):
Right.
So these people who have a sense of working with community are the best to be tapped in into the framework of the state.
Are there any government schemes and policy when all of that, which are support the adoption?
So there's a regulation which says that every new home has to have rainbow harvesting.
It's mandated now in Bangalore and it also tells you what rainbow harvesting should be.
(40:05):
So it says that for a square meter of roof area, you need to create a 60 liter storage or recharge structure.
And for a square meter of paved area, you need to create a 30 liter storage or recharge structure.
And you'll get your water connection from the BWB.
This is the only if you demonstrate that you've done rainbow harvesting else.
If you don't do rainbow harvesting, you have to pay up an energy, you have to pay 25% extra over your water bill for the first six months.
(40:30):
And if you still don't do it, you have to pay 50% extra over that.
So there are regulations in place.
Similarly, the BBMP makes it mandatory for every plan of the world to have rainbow harvesting to show that.
And to show how rainbow harvesting is to be done.
So those regulations and by-laws are already there. We just need to follow the law.
And sometimes the structure is there in place during construction, but then it's not really functional.
(40:55):
So what do we ensure it remains functional?
So maintenance is the key with every structure as we know, especially with rainbow harvesting systems.
Just test it.
If there's a recharge pit, just pour a half a tanker of water when water is not scarce.
Pour a half a tanker.
See whether it's recharging into the ground or not.
Then try and find out whether the filter is clogged or not clogged.
(41:16):
Make sure that the catchment of the roof, whether it's clean or not.
These are simple precautions.
And do it.
Water test to figure out what is being stored, whether it's moving in the correct way or not.
And it's not very difficult to do that once you understand where the problem is.
Is it at the roof level? Is it at the filter level? Is it at the storage or at the recharge level?
(41:37):
Then you fix that.
Any good decent lumber should be able to help you with that sort of auditing of the system.
So any other way of resources or policies available, resources or schemes available,
which help help people learn about it and adopt it.
So there are many websites which tell you about rainbow harvesting, how it can be done.
(42:01):
And many of them are run by educational institutions, which are local.
If you want to do rainbow harvesting in Chennai, it's different from how you do rainbow harvesting in Bangalore or in Mumbai.
It's different because the rainfall pattern is different.
Water needs are different and the soil profile is different.
So go to the local one and pick up that information there.
One good place to look at is the central ground water toward websites.
(42:25):
They give you basic information on geology.
And sometimes they give you very good information on how to design rainbow research structures.
So look out for websites which are credible from as close to you as it's possible.
So contextual knowledge.
Absolutely.
And look at case studies which demonstrate how it's been working for some time.
That will teach you a lot.
(42:46):
So how can you make this a movement like bring more people to India across to practice this?
That's what we're trying to do with Goprin Guru as well.
Correct.
So first we practice ourselves.
Then we create a volunteer group of people who practice it.
(43:08):
And so that group ideates reach out to the public.
You reach out to for example, government schools and get a lot of skits interested in what are harvesting, understanding what are harvesting.
Retort to colleges with environmental sciences taught agriculture, restored work with them to create this buzz around what pain would have been.
Means hold small rallies, celebrate what day around remote harvesting structures, world environment day on rainbow harvesting structures.
(43:32):
Create more conversations and build narratives of success stories and pilot projects of helping others.
And then it becomes a movement.
You don't start by designing a movement.
You start by doing things and convincing five other people to follow you.
Would you have any journaling prompt or activity for people to deepen their understanding and connection with water?
(44:00):
Activity.
Well, one of the activities that I recommend strongly is to go to your nearest lake.
Go to it in terms of the rainy season when there's some water in it.
And observe it carefully both in terms of what's happening there, the quality of water, the quantity of water and how nature behaves around it.
If you get a chance to see a well close by which has water observe the well and see how it responds to the rain, how it fluctuates, what's happening to it.
(44:25):
If possible, clean up the water body, clean up the well, clean up the storm grain which brings water to it.
So start by participating.
Once you pick up, let's say 10 bags of plastic littering a lake, the lake becomes yours.
Then you hate people littering around you.
But till you pick up that first plastic bag, you only feel a theoretical concern for the lake.
(44:46):
The moment you pick it up, the moment you clean a space, then it's your space.
And you get really irritated if people are littering and throwing stuff like that.
So develop that association with that water body and develop a sense of ownership of that particular water body or even a well or anything of that sort.
And then work your way to find solutions to pursue it.
People not to litter, not to pollute and to take care of it.
(45:09):
That's a beautiful activity to get closer to iris.
So it's just observe and connect with it.
Would you have any other messages to share to our listeners?
Look at the livelihoods that are being created.
Even in urban areas, when we regenerate lakes, we assume it that it's for an aesthetic purpose, that we go walking around it or cycling around it.
But just if you see a wetland, you'll see many people cut grass, take it for their cows as water.
(45:34):
There are many people who cut these reeds and make max out of it.
There are many livelihoods. There are small people who come and pick up small plants for their kitchen, edible plants.
We don't even know about it many of us about it.
So a lake or a water body provides a lot of livelihood support.
Once you start to see it, observe it and understand it, then you'll start to appreciate it.
(45:55):
And then you'll see it from the lens of the most marginalized, who depend on nature as their resource space for living.
And if you start to work to enhance that livelihood space and incorporate ecology or environment around it, it's a beautiful feeling that we get.
So when the first painted store comes to one of the lakes that we are part of, it's such joy you can't describe it.
(46:17):
Or when we revive a tank in a village and water comes to it and paddy is cultivated, and the songs of paddy harvesting come back to the village after 12 years.
Now women harvest, when they harvest, they sing a song.
There's a particular song to be sung during planting, there's a particular song to be sung during harvesting.
If those songs come back and you have the privilege of being there and listening to it, it's a very nice feeling.
(46:40):
And the tangibles are perhaps more important than the tangibles itself.
And so learn to appreciate the intangibles that we have around us and try to enhance it and make sure that it's available for future generations.
Yeah, songs and stories.
Such an important part of my life.
Absolutely.
Truly. So at the overflow of a tank, what they call, "kodi, what do you do in Kanada?"
(47:04):
It's the tank is full and full. It's a sense of joy for the whole village. They all get together.
Every house has to contribute something or the other. Everybody participates around the festival.
And then you have food there, cook there, everybody shares the food.
So there's a sense of joy that water has come to us in abundance, like pungal, right? But we celebrate upon dance.
(47:25):
So those culture elements are now sort of gone missing from our lives.
In front of time, we have to bring them back in a more accessible fashion for everybody and celebrate water in our lives.
We don't have to feel water as only being guilty, or polluted, or littered in it. We must celebrate water.
Let us celebrate water. That's really fitting into our conversation.
(47:48):
Thank you so much.
So how can people connect with you and with the work of biome?
So I'm, we're all on biomecrust.org, www.bomecrust.org, or www.urbanwaters.in.
And I'm @ZenRainman on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, everywhere. So @ZenRainman on send me a message. Happy to talk to you.
(48:10):
Thank you so much, sir. It's been a pleasure talking to you and I've learnt a lot about the nuances of water today.
And how we can make it a part of our lives.
Thank you for tuning in to this conversation on Reno to harvesting.
So what are your takeaways? What are the steps you're going to implement in your life?
(48:37):
Share it with us in the comments, tag us on social media at GoggingRewSS, or write to us at contact@goggingrew.com.
We'd love to hear your story. Subscribe to our channel so you don't miss a future episode.
Share widely so we can build that water conversation. One drop, one story, one thought, one action at a time.
(49:07):
(soft music)
Instead of competing with each other to finish off the groundwater,
(00:03):
if we together come and then fill the aquifer, both of us have water.
The rain that will lead off into the to the drains or to the road from your house causes floods.
So if you want floods to be prevented, you should harvest rainwater.
Two, the water that you depend from your bore well or open well comes from rain water alone which goes into the aquifer.
(00:25):
So if you recharge your aquifer or store water, you're going to solve your water shortage problem.
These are the two reasons why citizens should get involved with rainwater harvesting, because water is becoming scarcer and scarcer.
It's a one-time investment
and a lifetime of collection. When you pour water and you see the earth drinking it,
ghatta ghatta ghatta as they say in Kannada,
It's a fantastic feeling because you're slaking the thirst of Mother Earth, right?
(00:49):
And when you do it enough, the well fills up with water.
You understand, "Oh, this is the place where water seems to infiltrate well". Just as a matter of example,
old termite mounds or trees which are green in the summer show areas where you can put the water in.
Understand where the soil is most spongy, make sure that it is more sandy and make sure that it goes in. That's the recharge zone.
But, we have to make a beginning.
(01:11):
And the beginning is a drum or a bucket below a rain spout.
That's rainwater harvesting at its simplest.
Welcome to GoGreenGuru (01:19):
Sustainability in Action.
I'm your host Ananya Sangameshwar and today we're diving deep into something that's so precious and integral to our lives.
Water.
We take it for granted, right?
But today, Bengaluru and several cities in India are facing the threat of a water crisis.
(01:47):
But it's time we work in synergy with water.
We have a very simple yet effective practice that each of us can adopt to build water resilience, rainwater harvesting.
We have a guest today, Vishwanathmi Sir, Director of Biome Environmental Solutions and Founder Trustee, Biome Environmental Trust.
(02:12):
Biome is doing phenomenal work in ecological design and water management with the focus on community and collaboration.
Their work has won them accolades, including the transformative cities award.
We delve into the why and how of rain water harvesting.
(02:33):
Look at how we can approach designing and implementing the whole system in our homes and communities.
And address some of the questions and challenges in their face as citizens on this journey.
Not just that, we re-imagine the way we look at water itself.
So tune in to this episode if you'd like to feel empowered to build water resilience.
(02:58):
A very warm welcome to GoGreenGuru, Sir, how are you doing?
I'm very good, Ananya and hope you're doing good too.
Thank you so much. I'm doing amazing and I'm really excited for learning more about rain water harvesting, learning about the work of biome.
(03:19):
It's really an inspiring journey and I'm sure you have a lot of wisdom and interesting stories to share. So I'm really looking forward.
I'm not sure about the wisdom part but definitely the experience I'm happy to share that.
Absolutely.
So to start off with, I'd love to know a story of your relationship with water. How has that evolved over time?
(03:42):
Well, I studied to be a civil engineer and as part of civil engineering, hydrology was one of the courses that we were taught.
And we were lucky to have a very good professor who conveyed the idea of hydrology very nicely.
And one got perhaps as interested as one could get as a college student in water. Later on I finished urban planning from the school of planning and the birth where I started to understand water in its context of a city or the region.
(04:10):
And finally when I started to work with the housing and urban development corporation, I was looking at housing projects and urban infrastructure projects which gave me a close contact with water, especially how communities interact with water.
And even as early as the late 80s, one could see that water was a crisis.
(04:30):
And so when I was building my house, I saw that it was raining at one point of time. Me and Jithrao was my, was an architect, I was my wife.
Both of us were standing in the house and it was raining. We were buying water from a tanker and we thought, "Ay, something wrong here. Why should rain water be wasted and why should we be paying for tanker water?"
So we then decided to start to work on harvesting rain water, learning more about the relationship of local waters with our lives and how we can engage with it in a meaningful fashion.
(04:58):
Yeah, that's a beautiful sharing, how you actually observe your surroundings, observe your house and you saw what's really happening there.
And you try to bring changes to really harness the rain water which was right there, which were getting wasted earlier.
So then how did this lead to a Biome? How did you, why and how did you start biome? What should rain with that?
(05:23):
So that, this was the day of the web was coming into place, right? We didn't have the internet, an onion when I started my career as an engineer, urban planner.
So as the net was coming, we got really excited about the possibilities of sharing knowledge and learning from, from all across the globe.
So we started a website called rainwaterclub.org and we thought that the virtual world would be a world where we could not have to register your company, you could just be a knowledge management, confer hub and a knowledge learning hub.
(05:55):
So I started to track rainfall patterns, daily rainfall data, which I used to get from the Indian Meteorological Department, try to find out how much water actually falls on a particular area on a city.
And then to device excel sheet based files to calculate how much rain could be harvested. So when I learned that in Bangalore from 100 square meter roof area, you could actually harvest about a lack of liters of rainwater.
(06:20):
That was sort of mind blowing. So then you thought, hey, why are we wasting all this resource? Why don't we check and make sure that the quality is good and that we could capture it?
So we started as rainwaterclub.org in, I think the late 90s, then we had to formally become biometrast, somewhere along the line because if you want to run NGO civil society group, you have to confirm to the financial norms of the country to be registered biometrast.
(06:47):
And it's been a great journey because there have been excellent people who come in as my colleagues and who have contributed a lot to the knowledge that we have created and the experience that we've got from the field and what we've been able to implement on the ground.
So good people around you, great people around you and great ideas in times of a societal need is where the rainwater club in biome started.
(07:09):
What have you learned along the way?
So any crisis with a natural resource or any issue of managing a natural resource in Rohingya, Nilek and his words, words, involves Samaj, Sargarh and Bazaar.
Many society, that's the us people, Sargarh which is the state and its institutions, Bazaar has in the market, service providers who provide services and other products around it.
(07:33):
So what we've been doing is to weigh on one too much and let the other two become bit players.
What I've learnt is that if we have a balance between all three, then great solutions are possible but at the heart of it is the community. If individuals and communities are not feeling that they need to be a part of the solution or work with it, then it's very difficult for either the state to have sustainable solutions or for the market to provide affordable solutions.
(08:02):
The market will generally leave out the poor, the state will be inefficient and will also leave out quite a set of people. But if we work with communities, then it's possible to retain local waters, developing understanding of local waters and be able to supplement the work of the state as well as the market and be self sufficient to allow the extent.
(08:24):
That's been my broad learning. The other final point that I want to make is that we should see water from a societal lens. Water is not just a physical product, it's a social product, it's a social construct.
We've done many discriminations around water and we've also done a lot of bad distribution around water. We should avoid that, we should make sure that water is accessible for all.
(08:47):
Even with GoGreenGuru, what we are trying to do is we are focusing on the community, on the people, how can we as such as citizens, take charge of the whole thing and really understand the nuances and the context.
Today there's the water crisis which is happening in Bangalore and in many urban places in India. So what have you learnt about the water crisis and why, what are the challenges really and why should, why should we care about it?
(09:18):
We are in the head of climate change, global warming, 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, the hydrological cycle is being affected but it's also affecting itself on a layer which is already very bad and we're at least speaking right.
We are destroying old growth forests, the western guards, the hub of our rivers are being destroyed as we speak. Local lakes and rivers are being polluted or are being consumed by real estate, construction debris going to water bodies.
(09:46):
We are not engaging enough to make sure that aquifers are recharged, right. We don't understand recharged zones and push water into groundwater, we're a ground water civilization.
So it's a complex case of neglect and an overconsumption of resources and a lack of attention to pollution. This is being the reason why water is becoming increasingly scarce and difficult for people to access.
(10:10):
And as you unravel this problem as you research more about it over time. So what have you discovered as the solution? So like what can be as of course there are many things to be done at a systemic level but then as citizens or at a community level, what all is possible today?
So let's talk about two contexts where I've been working on one is the rural context of the tank ecosystem. You know we have carries as we call in Canada these are human made water bodies by throwing a band across a valley, right.
(10:44):
This was done a thousand years back, a thousand to one hundred years back, some of them 500 to 600 years back. But this these tank ecosystem was the hub of water for the village for a long, long time.
But they were created during a feudal time when aristocracy was in place when they were polygons and kings and such. Now we are in a democracy.
So in a democracy, how should then old historical ecosystem like a tank function? Some learnings if water comes to a tank in a village who benefits.
(11:14):
Usually it's those who have the land, the more land you have, the more you benefit from the water because you can get one crop, two crops or three crops.
But if you don't have land, how does water matter to you? At best it may give you some bit of drinking water but anyway the government is giving you the drinking water.
So how do you make sure that there's equal access societally to that water of the tank which is a rainwater harvesting system, right.
(11:39):
That what we've learned is then you involve the land less, especially the women as part of the solution.
And you make sure that they are engaged right from the beginning with the share of the pie, the pie being the water that comes.
So they clean up the feeder channels, the distribution channels, make the ecosystem robust so that everybody has access to water.
But in turn, the village promises to keep, let's say one third of the water for goats and sheep.
(12:05):
The land is people generally have goats and sheep so therefore they are able to make a living out of the waters in the tank.
Another thing that can be done is that the fishing rights of the water body can go to women self-help groups, especially to people who don't own land.
So therefore you have to negotiate the benefits of water in a just and equitable manner so that everybody gains, not that somebody gains.
(12:28):
So remember water is not just an environmental construct or a physical construct, it's a social construct, right. It's a societal construct.
And so therefore you have to work on the social construct to regenerate the ecological construct and the physical construct.
That's one thing in the village context. In the urban areas take a city like Bangalore. Bangalore had a lot of lakes and tanks, but necessarily had to go to the Arikavati in the Kavari river to bring water from far because in the era of drought in the years of drought,
(12:57):
like if you are continues to or three years of drought, the tanks were insufficient to provide water to people.
Modern human beings need 135 liters per capita per day or at least a bare minimum 100 liters per capita per day, right. 100 liters per percent per day.
The tanks and the lakes are not sufficient to give that 100 liters per percent per day.
So therefore we have to combine the tanks as a supplement and bring water from the river, but we have to make sure that it is universally accessible.
(13:24):
Piped water should reach everybody, some water for all, not all water for some, right. That's the way we have to think.
Plus we have to think about what we call integrated urban water management.
Meaning we must think of rainwater as a resource, we must think of groundwater as a resource, surface water, lakes, rivers and streams as a resource, pipe water from the river as a resource and finally,
(13:46):
wastewater or treated wastewater as a resource. If we plan including all these five, then we have substantially enough resource to manage ourselves.
But if we plan in silos, only look at one or the other, then we will run out of water because there's no resource.
But all the planning with all the forms of water has to be universal access.
Everybody should get their fair share of water as a human right and later on as an economic goal.
(14:12):
50 liters per person per day for example free because it's a human right. But the 51st liter to be charged so that you conserve water and that you make sure that the institution for institution providing the water has the money to invest in extending the infrastructure keeping the network going, right.
So these are the two things that I learned, societal concerns and universal access.
(14:34):
We have very valid points. So essentially we look at water as an ecosystem. We can see it today as well, like how we have a lot of water, we have enough rainwater coming in but most of it.
But we are still facing a scarcity of water, we take water from many kilometers away and at the same time we see our streets flooded during any heavy rains.
(15:01):
So there is some kind of paradox happening there. So when we look at water in this terms of design in terms of an overall design, I think we can work on mitigating this.
Exactly. As you rightly point out floods and droughts are the common cause for both floods and droughts are the same mismanagement of rainwater.
(15:25):
If you mismanage rains when they fall, they cause floods. And if you mismanage rains when they're actually falling, you can cause a drought.
The same water, if it's stored in a lake or a pond or in the aquifer below when it is raining heavily will become drought-proofing solutions for us in the summer months, right, or in the dry season.
(15:46):
So both of them have the same cause and that's what a harvesting that is the solution for both floods and droughts.
Let's dig a bit deeper into what a harvesting. So how do you demystify what a harvesting? Now we are not, we've all heard of it, but we're like, what is it really?
How do you really explain this to a lay person?
(16:07):
Well, at its simplest, let's say rain is falling on the rooftop, just put a drum below the pipe which brings the water down from the rooftop and you're rainwater harvesting.
You can collect the water, you can use it for your plants or pots or for washing your garden or water in your garden or washing your dried areas.
So that's the rainwater harvesting. It's as simple as that, a drum below the rain's power.
(16:29):
Once you start, it's always the starting trouble that we have, you know, we think of it as a theoretical exercise, then we don't move, but just put that bucket or the drum below the rain pipe and you've started with rainwater harvesting.
Then you'll start to understand how much volume of water is falling and use, when the bucket overflows or the drum overflows, oh, you say it's as a waste, right?
Because you're starting to collect, if you don't collect everything is a waste, but you don't mind, but when you start to collect, overflow is a waste.
(16:55):
Then you make bigger drums, you start to understand how the rainfall pattern is, what is the quality of rainwater? What can I do to store it?
Can I recharge it into the ground? So for example, recharging means a small pit in the ground, which you put water in and let it infiltrate into the ground.
That can become a recharge well, which is usually three feet in diameter and twenty feet deep in the Bangalore context.
(17:16):
So when you pour water and you see the earth drinking it, got it, got it, got it, got it, it's a fantastic feeling because you're slaking the thirst of mother earth, right?
And when you do it enough, the well fills up with water. Then you can start to draw it.
And the compact that we have between the rain and earth and the soil and we're privileged to be part of the solution making space.
But we have to make a beginning and the beginning is a drum or a bucket below a rain's power. That's rainwater harvesting at its simplest.
(17:45):
I love how you started with that simple step because we get over and over we need to design the whole system into consultations.
Of course, all that comes but then this is the starting point.
You don't have to consult an expert, it's so simple and you don't have to think of all my roof, I want to harvest, I need a large sum.
No, just even a hundred needed drum will fill up 60 times if you use it every time because it rains 60 days in a year in Bangalore.
(18:13):
So a hundred liter drum into 60, 6000 liters of water, right?
For our use. So that's the way we must begin and not let it overwhelm us with its complexities.
Thank you for breaking it down into that simple way.
Taking that simple step will not be a problem for us.
That will be a good starting point.
(18:35):
And one of the other things you can do on an air is to buy a rain gauge.
You can make your own rain gauge or can buy a rain gauge for as low as 700 or 800 rupees these days.
If you make it yourself it won't cost you more than 20 rupees with a pet bottle.
Just place a rain gauge and start to measure rain every day, right?
Whenever it rains, you will be astounded at the number that starts to come to you and then you'll start to think,
(18:58):
"Oh my God, how much water am I wasting with the rain gauge?"
So rain gauge is a good beginning.
So now let's look at it from the point of view of citizens.
Maybe they're different concerns people have or they're different things they want to understand about it.
Maybe I'll ask some questions on the point of view of a citizen who's unfamiliar with this idea and we can go from there.
(19:23):
So say, I must say, "Doesn't why I should actually do rain water harvesting? What's the purpose?
Why is it my problem or my response?"
Why is it my problem?
So two reasons.
One, the rain that you'll let off into the trains or to the road from your house causes floods.
So if you want floods to be prevented, you should harvest rain water.
(19:47):
Two, the water that you depend from your bore well or open well comes from rain water alone which goes into the aquifer.
So if you recharge your aquifer or store water, you're going to solve your water shortage problem.
These are the two reasons why citizens should get involved with rain water harvesting
because water is becoming scarcer and scarcer in this world of hours.
(20:08):
And it's becoming costly like people are finding in Bangalore that when you buy tanker water, it's now astronomical figures.
150 rupees and 1000 liters, 200 rupees and 1000 liters.
That's an enormous amount of money that you have to pay.
But if everybody does rain water harvesting, starting with us, then we won't have this problem at all of water shortages.
That's why we must do rain water harvesting.
(20:30):
Absolutely.
And then let's look at it from a monetary point of view as well.
So let's compare, say in one household, if we go things the normal road, maybe we get pipe water from the municipal supply,
maybe we dig bore wells for getting more water or maybe we get some water tankers or then finally we need to filter our water as well for drinking.
(20:59):
So all of that leads to some expenses.
So that versus if we have, if we follow rain water harvesting, what would the expenses compare like?
So yes, the thing, if you're building a new house or a new apartment, rain water harvesting will not cost you anything at all.
Because usually people in Bangalore and many other cities build large sometime to store pipe water from the network or when we buy from tankers,
(21:25):
or they have drilled a bore well already right?
People have a, have a roof on their heads and that roof needs downpipes to bring all the rain water down.
So everything is done.
The roof is there, the catchment, the pipes which bring it down, the storage or the structure which will receive recharge water.
All you need to invest in is a filter.
If you put in a filter, you're then able to harvest all the roof covering water.
(21:48):
Only smart thing to do, make sure that the downpipes are in the direction of the sunk tank or the direction of the well.
Just slope the roof that way, put a filter and you harvest it.
So it will cost you something like 5,000 rupees or 7,000 rupees.
When you're spending 80 lakhs, 60 lakhs, 50 lakhs on your house, 5,000 rupees is 1% or less right?
So it really doesn't cost you anything at all if you're smart in the new house.
(22:10):
So in the new house, there's no reason at all why you shouldn't do rain water harvesting on the basis of cost.
Let's take an old house when you have to retrofare.
Again, think smart as I was talking to you before.
Don't think of capturing the whole roof.
Just capture the pipe nearest to the sunk tank.
There will always be one downpipe nearest to the sunk tank.
Stick a filter, leave it to your existing sunk tank or a well that you have.
Again, the cost would not be more than 5,000 to 7,000 rupees.
(22:34):
Yes, you will not collect all the roof, rain water.
But once you make a beginning, you'll start to then invest in phases overcoming the cost barrier and collect it.
I, for example, pick up rain water from the state case roof.
The state case roof in every home is slightly at an elevated place.
It's a clean catchment because nobody ever walks on it.
That water I use only for drinking and cooking.
(22:56):
Now, if I were to substitute that water by buying water for drinking and cooking,
I'd pay 5 rupees for 20 liters from an aroplant.
I have to go to the aroplant and buy it and bring it.
If I buy it as bottled water, which is 20 rupees for a liter, right?
So here's all the years drinking and cooking water, which comes from rain water for free.
Once I've put in that 500 liter HDB tank, the storage, right?
(23:19):
A classic term to store it.
So it depends on which water you want to substitute.
If you substitute your drinking and cooking water, your return on investment is almost six months.
Within that, you recover your money.
Then by beginning small and doing it when your house is being built,
you reduce the cost and make sure that the water is on it.
Finally, remember one thing with rain water harvesting.
It's a one-time investment.
(23:41):
And a lifetime of collection.
All that you need to do over the lifetime of the structure is just to keep cleaning the filter down in there.
And it's a very easy task.
It takes no more than five minutes, especially it has to be done after with any day.
So single investment, 25 years of rain water collection.
That's the beauty of the system.
If you look at digging water, what about that expense?
(24:02):
But it's a one-time expense without any guarantee because you may not strike water, right?
So people now, for example, in Bangalore, are drilling to 1400 feet,
spending four lakh to five lakh rupees.
And maybe you don't get any water at all after spending five lakhs.
The same five lakhs, if we built a large 50,000 liter sometime,
you'd be assured of all the year-round supply from your rooftop.
That's very true.
(24:23):
So the board will, when we dig also, with more time, there is less guarantee.
But with rain water harvesting, there is no fluctuation.
Exactly.
So what happens is in competitive drilling, your neighbor drills a bore well 600 feet,
you drill 800 feet, per chap's bore well goes dry, he then goes a thousand feet,
your bore well goes dry.
So it becomes competitive consumption, whereas we need cooperative refilling,
(24:48):
right?
Instead of competing with each other to finish off the groundwater, repeat.
Together come and then fill the aquifer, both of us have water.
So I'll tell you the example of a gated community,
they're the band-aid individual bore wells.
And they made rain water harvesting and recharge band-aid tree.
360 sites were there, all 360 houses, recharge the aquifer,
(25:09):
and only three bore wells were allowed, right?
So everybody is participating in recharging the aquifer,
but community is drawing water from three bore wells and supplying it,
putting a meter and saying we will not use more than 20,000 liter someone.
So therefore, there is self-sustinance.
Imagine the scenario otherwise.
All 360 of them would have sunk bore wells, one after the other,
(25:31):
two lakh rupees per bore well, even if we imagine that cheaper cost,
it's 7.2 crore rupees in sinking bore wells which will all go dry.
Whereas if you do the rain water harvesting,
it only costs 50,000 rupees to do a recharge structure.
Not only are you saving money, but you're making sure that water becomes
sustainably available for you.
So we have to think of ourselves as a community rather than an individual
(25:54):
competing with the community. We have to think of ourselves working together to solve the problem.
That's a really, really, really important perspective,
looking at it as a community resource, rather than just for an individual.
Because when we actually share and contribute together,
we get much more benefits together and once left behind.
And there's one very interesting example that we had with open wells that we revive recently.
(26:19):
The women of the community came and said, don't put a pump.
If you put a pump, we will waste the water or it will go to the apartments nearby
and the well will go dry. We will go to the well and say the five,
you know, draw the water from the pulley and use the water ourselves.
We need no more than four parts in a day and all of us will go to the water and try it.
So even now in this peak summer in Bangalore,
there's still water in an open well.
(26:41):
And the women are getting water from the open well for their use.
So demand management, understanding how much can the earth provide
and staying within those limits of the earth's provision is crucial.
And who brought the knowledge, the women who actually lift the water from the well.
So listen to the community, especially listen to women in the community
because they are the key bearers of water and take their advice and making sure
(27:02):
whatever the more harvesting systems we design are designed for them and with them
because they are the water ministers.
Yeah, gender play has a really important connection with water.
Women have that understanding that.
And you live in close proximity to nature or to our resources when we actually look,
(27:23):
look and understand, look and observe.
Then it really helps us use it better.
So I don't want to stereotype, but men think of large infrastructure projects,
build an over-retank, build a bore well, put pipes and pumps and move things around,
spend tons of money. Whereas women think of how do I get water at my house.
And that's a different lens altogether.
When you say, I'm not bothered about the large infrastructure, I want water for my needs near my house.
(27:49):
The answers are different as solutions.
Suppose I invest in water harvesting structure now in my house.
So how long does it take for me to see the results or maybe get water or recharge back with fur?
The first trend will give you water.
The ideal combination is one of storage and recharge, right? You store some and you push the other into the aquifer.
(28:15):
The very first trend will give you the benefits.
It will start from day one.
Suppose you're doing your rainbow harvesting in the month of April.
The April showers and may showers themselves to start to bless you with water.
When water is the most scarce and critical and crucial, you'll be able to get those waters and then start to use it.
And obviously during the rainy season, you'll have plenty of water, August September October, November.
(28:36):
These four months are abundant rains, so we'll benefit a lot from it.
So we collect some in a tank and then we do some purification system and we can use that for drinking, cooking purposes and other...
Keep the roof clean.
Keep the roof clean so that there's no leaves or anything on it, right? Dust it with the broom.
(28:57):
Make sure you have a filter, a good filter and then collect it in the sand tank.
So then the water is very good. If you find any problems, you can use a bit of chlorine tablets, one or two chlorine tablets to disinfect the water.
If you think that the water is bad, right? And then you can use it directly.
So it's as simple as that. You don't need any filtration post storage.
You don't need anything at all. Just chlorine tablets will help.
(29:19):
You get this beautiful H2S Y and testing kits. These are small bottles where you can put a bit of the water and check for bacteria.
In 36 hours, if it goes black, there's E-coli in it, so then you put the chlorine tablets.
It doesn't glow back. You don't even have to put the chlorine tablets. It's good to go.
How do we approach the whole designing of the system?
How do we understand my context and build the whole system accordingly?
(29:46):
So one thing to do is to get data on the rainfall in your locality.
How much does it rain in a year? That gives you the total volume of rain water that can harvest.
The second is to study the number of rainy days. How many days it does it rain? And which month does it rain?
So that's the distribution. So when you understand the distribution, you optimize your storage system for that distribution.
(30:08):
Don't build a huge tank to store all the water in the beginning.
Just build a small tank, store the water, and allow the overflow to reach as well.
Put it in into the ground.
So optimize your storage system based on the rainfall pattern in your area.
However, in many waterscares areas, perhaps you will have to build a large tank because that will be the only water that you get for drinking and cooking.
(30:32):
That will be the only water. Like in Gujarat or Rajasthan, that may be the size.
But in urban areas, rain water is usually a supplement to all other waters. And supplement means that you need to build a small tank.
So we understand our rainfall patterns and then also see our roof size and then do the bottom.
And then you multiply it by that. That's a coefficient of runoff.
Calculate what is the runoff for each rain and then optimize your design on what you feel comfortable.
(30:56):
Usually, let's say a thousand liter tank will fill up 60 times. A six thousand liter tank will fill up maybe 20 times alone.
So it depends on what you're comfortable with with your budget and you then put that tank.
But begin with once you put that in system in place, then you can automatically expand it when you want.
So this is for an independent house context. And then also how do we check if we're doing it the correct way.
(31:24):
How do we understand it which is effective doing audit, doing all of that.
So one of the things is to figure out from your neighbors, somebody of the other would have done rainbow harvesting.
To pick the nearest neighbor that you think was rainbow harvesting and find out and ask them.
They'll be able to give you very good advice. Don't go very far.
In the city of Bangalore, if you're here, we have a rainbow harvesting theme park. In Chennai, there's a rain center.
(31:46):
You can go to this theme park or rain center and get a lot of advice on how to manage and make it the system.
There are many websites which give you information on those and don't support rainbow harvesting. So do that.
But hey, try it. If you fail, you will learn and you will improve. It's not going to kill you, right?
You'll only maybe have a leaking pipe or a leak somewhere in your sometime or somewhere near the filter or something, but there's nothing that you can't fix it.
(32:12):
Don't think that you can do everything full proof in one go.
I've had flooding from my rooftop into my basement at one point of time because I did a stupid thing of trying to filter it at the roof level itself.
But that teaches you a lesson and then you improve. Approach it with the with with humility and a sense of learning.
And then as you go along, you get better at it. And it's not rocket science. You'll fix it within a month.
(32:38):
Yeah, you learn as you go. Absolutely. Make mistakes. The world is made to make mistakes.
And then what about at a community level? How do we go about it?
So like I said, cooperation is the way to go. So what we need to do if you want to recharge the aquifer is to identify what we call recharge zones.
(32:59):
These are areas where the water percolates into the earth and gets into the aquifer fast.
And there are discharge zones where the water comes up at the groundwater table and you can draw the water from either open wells or boroughs or shallow filter boroughs or deep boroughs.
Right. So with the community, map the geology of the place, take the help of a professional if you want to and make sure that you understand these recharge and discharge zones.
(33:21):
But do so in a spirit of sharing where everybody recharges, but there's only community draw and sharing of the waters that have been so recharged.
Don't go for private more well to draw the water out and private recharge that maybe the individual thing that to do if you don't have a sense of community, but at a community level, it gets more effective.
Get a larger area together and you share it together. Absolutely.
(33:45):
Because then you have roads and open spaces and parks also becoming available to you. All these are recharge zones, not just your site or building, all these common areas and common facilities and in apartments, the great, the strong water drains become great places for recharge.
So identify every one of the places where you can put the water in. Make sure that it's not polluted, right.
Make sure that there's no rosy, make sure that there's no solid base being dumped there. No oil and grease there that in the catchment and then make sure that it goes through a filtration process before it reaches the aquifer.
(34:14):
Or before it is stored. So how do we understand the context of our region? Like how do we understand what is a recharge zone, the start phone, that up to naturally.
So it's a water literacy that we have to once we are familiar with this term, Google it, you'll figure out what it means and there'll be a lot of other information available to you.
(34:35):
And it's simple common sense if you ask a traditional well digger in our place of somebody with the common sense you you understand, oh this is the place but what seems to be right.
Just as a matter of example, old termite mountains or trees which have which are green in summer show areas where you can put the water easily.
Yeah, so look at the landscape of its sandy soil, then it reaches as well if it's clay soil, it won't go in fast. If it's hard rock, it won't go in obviously.
(35:03):
So understand where the soil is more spongy, make sure that it's more sandy and make sure that it goes in that's the recharge zone, that's the way you're to.
Hill tops recharge zones, valleys, discharge zones, normal understanding. So that's you learn as you go along.
And if the land is sloping in a certain way, so the bottom of the slope is where we let water work lit inside the top.
(35:30):
So it's called the reach valley approach, you put the water in at the top and you draw it from the bottom.
Okay, got it. We understand the layer of the land and then that you will get a closer to nature.
And then you understand the rock layer below, sometimes the land itself may not be talking to the rock layer below or the clay layer below, so you have to understand the top of the surface of the land as well as what is below the soil.
(35:57):
So we dig an experiment in that way.
You have a history like if you have old wells, which have been around for a long time, which are water, that's the discharge zone, that's where you'll get the water.
If you have drilled bore wells, you know what is the depth of the casing, which tells you the weathered zone, right?
So there's a lot of other signals that you can pick up.
How do we do it on a rooftop in a community level as well?
(36:18):
How do we go to that?
So at a community level, every rooftop is something that is private generally or there's a common clubhouse or common feature there, right?
Or a school, for example, in a community, get a community.
So there you, the rooftop rainbow harvesting system remains the same.
You pick all the water, bring it down, down pipes, filter it and store it and access, put it into the ground.
(36:41):
Right? So that's that's the charge.
So you do that there at that scale.
But at a community level, like I keep telling you, your roads and storm water drains are for you, the potential for more recharge.
So you do it there also.
Make the recharge wells and recharge weights in the storm drains and all of the water to infiltrate.
Yeah, make the best use of the possible resources.
Yeah, divide the land into rooftops, paved surfaces and unpaved surfaces.
(37:05):
Root tops are generally the cleanest water so you can collect it.
There may be a bit of pollution and dust, so you need to biologically filter it through swells and green filters.
Then unpaved surfaces by denser are allowing recharge.
Make sure that you have it as a as a valley or a draft for a swell so that water torqually stops.
Three roof pave unpaved.
(37:27):
So how do we actually go about convincing people are getting the community along to practice it?
There are a few good people to begin with.
You start with 5 or 10 volunteers who come forward and work volunteering and then it's a slow process of negotiation and explaining the benefits and demonstrating it through those initial pilot structures that you do.
(37:50):
And in general, most people are convinced over some period of time start with the early movers.
They will be the first to put in the money and do the stuff.
Then talk a lot about it.
Allow the message to go to everybody.
If you have more and more people and once you cross a threshold then everybody joins it.
But what was ready to start off?
Correct.
People light and have them but don't impose your ideas and values.
(38:12):
Don't go about being a proselytizer or an evangelist for rainwater harvesting.
Get the message in slowly.
Don't make yourself a new sense for other people with your wonderful idea.
Just be gently persuasive.
Keep showing and demonstrating and saying what's happening and then people come on board.
So how do you pitch it to your IWAs as well?
Just show examples of other RWA's.
(38:34):
Just show examples.
Take them to one of the things that I noticed is if you go see what an RWA is done.
Then observe what is there.
Then it really makes a difference to you.
Rather than any power point or any amount of talking, seeing is believing.
And absolutely seeing and working is believing.
And when RWA is talked to other RWA's and understand the problems of the system also, how to deal with it.
(38:57):
That's a very powerful word.
Hello, I think from people who have done it.
From communities who have done it.
Exactly.
Great way.
And I think in the bio or the urban waters side, they are resources on how to convince people.
Yeah, we made comic books.
We made examples.
We highlighted the work of people and a lot of case studies are available for you.
(39:20):
And there are contact numbers where you can phone people and find out from them.
Well diggers are listed, plumbers are listed, books are made available, brochures are made available.
We are learning platform for everybody to tap in and get what they want.
These days, there's a solid amount of volunteering that many, many communities do.
And many people do with solid base, for example, or with lakes, for example, or parks or dogs like that.
(39:43):
Right.
So these people who have a sense of working with community are the best to be tapped in into the framework of the state.
Are there any government schemes and policy when all of that, which are support the adoption?
So there's a regulation which says that every new home has to have rainbow harvesting.
It's mandated now in Bangalore and it also tells you what rainbow harvesting should be.
(40:05):
So it says that for a square meter of roof area, you need to create a 60 liter storage or recharge structure.
And for a square meter of paved area, you need to create a 30 liter storage or recharge structure.
And you'll get your water connection from the BWB.
This is the only if you demonstrate that you've done rainbow harvesting else.
If you don't do rainbow harvesting, you have to pay up an energy, you have to pay 25% extra over your water bill for the first six months.
(40:30):
And if you still don't do it, you have to pay 50% extra over that.
So there are regulations in place.
Similarly, the BBMP makes it mandatory for every plan of the world to have rainbow harvesting to show that.
And to show how rainbow harvesting is to be done.
So those regulations and by-laws are already there. We just need to follow the law.
And sometimes the structure is there in place during construction, but then it's not really functional.
(40:55):
So what do we ensure it remains functional?
So maintenance is the key with every structure as we know, especially with rainbow harvesting systems.
Just test it.
If there's a recharge pit, just pour a half a tanker of water when water is not scarce.
Pour a half a tanker.
See whether it's recharging into the ground or not.
Then try and find out whether the filter is clogged or not clogged.
(41:16):
Make sure that the catchment of the roof, whether it's clean or not.
These are simple precautions.
And do it.
Water test to figure out what is being stored, whether it's moving in the correct way or not.
And it's not very difficult to do that once you understand where the problem is.
Is it at the roof level? Is it at the filter level? Is it at the storage or at the recharge level?
(41:37):
Then you fix that.
Any good decent lumber should be able to help you with that sort of auditing of the system.
So any other way of resources or policies available, resources or schemes available,
which help help people learn about it and adopt it.
So there are many websites which tell you about rainbow harvesting, how it can be done.
(42:01):
And many of them are run by educational institutions, which are local.
If you want to do rainbow harvesting in Chennai, it's different from how you do rainbow harvesting in Bangalore or in Mumbai.
It's different because the rainfall pattern is different.
Water needs are different and the soil profile is different.
So go to the local one and pick up that information there.
One good place to look at is the central ground water toward websites.
(42:25):
They give you basic information on geology.
And sometimes they give you very good information on how to design rainbow research structures.
So look out for websites which are credible from as close to you as it's possible.
So contextual knowledge.
Absolutely.
And look at case studies which demonstrate how it's been working for some time.
That will teach you a lot.
(42:46):
So how can you make this a movement like bring more people to India across to practice this?
That's what we're trying to do with Goprin Guru as well.
Correct.
So first we practice ourselves.
Then we create a volunteer group of people who practice it.
(43:08):
And so that group ideates reach out to the public.
You reach out to for example, government schools and get a lot of skits interested in what are harvesting, understanding what are harvesting.
Retort to colleges with environmental sciences taught agriculture, restored work with them to create this buzz around what pain would have been.
Means hold small rallies, celebrate what day around remote harvesting structures, world environment day on rainbow harvesting structures.
(43:32):
Create more conversations and build narratives of success stories and pilot projects of helping others.
And then it becomes a movement.
You don't start by designing a movement.
You start by doing things and convincing five other people to follow you.
Would you have any journaling prompt or activity for people to deepen their understanding and connection with water?
(44:00):
Activity.
Well, one of the activities that I recommend strongly is to go to your nearest lake.
Go to it in terms of the rainy season when there's some water in it.
And observe it carefully both in terms of what's happening there, the quality of water, the quantity of water and how nature behaves around it.
If you get a chance to see a well close by which has water observe the well and see how it responds to the rain, how it fluctuates, what's happening to it.
(44:25):
If possible, clean up the water body, clean up the well, clean up the storm grain which brings water to it.
So start by participating.
Once you pick up, let's say 10 bags of plastic littering a lake, the lake becomes yours.
Then you hate people littering around you.
But till you pick up that first plastic bag, you only feel a theoretical concern for the lake.
(44:46):
The moment you pick it up, the moment you clean a space, then it's your space.
And you get really irritated if people are littering and throwing stuff like that.
So develop that association with that water body and develop a sense of ownership of that particular water body or even a well or anything of that sort.
And then work your way to find solutions to pursue it.
People not to litter, not to pollute and to take care of it.
(45:09):
That's a beautiful activity to get closer to iris.
So it's just observe and connect with it.
Would you have any other messages to share to our listeners?
Look at the livelihoods that are being created.
Even in urban areas, when we regenerate lakes, we assume it that it's for an aesthetic purpose, that we go walking around it or cycling around it.
But just if you see a wetland, you'll see many people cut grass, take it for their cows as water.
(45:34):
There are many people who cut these reeds and make max out of it.
There are many livelihoods. There are small people who come and pick up small plants for their kitchen, edible plants.
We don't even know about it many of us about it.
So a lake or a water body provides a lot of livelihood support.
Once you start to see it, observe it and understand it, then you'll start to appreciate it.
(45:55):
And then you'll see it from the lens of the most marginalized, who depend on nature as their resource space for living.
And if you start to work to enhance that livelihood space and incorporate ecology or environment around it, it's a beautiful feeling that we get.
So when the first painted store comes to one of the lakes that we are part of, it's such joy you can't describe it.
(46:17):
Or when we revive a tank in a village and water comes to it and paddy is cultivated, and the songs of paddy harvesting come back to the village after 12 years.
Now women harvest, when they harvest, they sing a song.
There's a particular song to be sung during planting, there's a particular song to be sung during harvesting.
If those songs come back and you have the privilege of being there and listening to it, it's a very nice feeling.
(46:40):
And the tangibles are perhaps more important than the tangibles itself.
And so learn to appreciate the intangibles that we have around us and try to enhance it and make sure that it's available for future generations.
Yeah, songs and stories.
Such an important part of my life.
Absolutely.
Truly. So at the overflow of a tank, what they call, "kodi, what do you do in Kanada?"
(47:04):
It's the tank is full and full. It's a sense of joy for the whole village. They all get together.
Every house has to contribute something or the other. Everybody participates around the festival.
And then you have food there, cook there, everybody shares the food.
So there's a sense of joy that water has come to us in abundance, like pungal, right? But we celebrate upon dance.
(47:25):
So those culture elements are now sort of gone missing from our lives.
In front of time, we have to bring them back in a more accessible fashion for everybody and celebrate water in our lives.
We don't have to feel water as only being guilty, or polluted, or littered in it. We must celebrate water.
Let us celebrate water. That's really fitting into our conversation.
(47:48):
Thank you so much.
So how can people connect with you and with the work of biome?
So I'm, we're all on biomecrust.org, www.bomecrust.org, or www.urbanwaters.in.
And I'm @ZenRainman on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, everywhere. So @ZenRainman on send me a message. Happy to talk to you.
(48:10):
Thank you so much, sir. It's been a pleasure talking to you and I've learnt a lot about the nuances of water today.
And how we can make it a part of our lives.
Thank you for tuning in to this conversation on Reno to harvesting.
So what are your takeaways? What are the steps you're going to implement in your life?
(48:37):
Share it with us in the comments, tag us on social media at GoggingRewSS, or write to us at contact@goggingrew.com.
We'd love to hear your story. Subscribe to our channel so you don't miss a future episode.
Share widely so we can build that water conversation. One drop, one story, one thought, one action at a time.
(49:07):
(soft music)
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