Mizoram to make every rain drop count

Aizawl, Nov 5 (UNI) With the success of combating water crisis in recent years by harvesting rain water during monsoon, the Mizoram government has initiated a fresh campaign to save each drop of water in the coming dry season.

As part of the mission, the Public Health Engineering (PHE) department has asked the local self government to motivate the rural people to harvest rain water and stop misuse of fresh water.

According to the meteorological officials here, the state has an average annual rainfall of 2260 mm, which is spread over 130 days.

However, during this monsoon Mizoram received about 22 per cent excess rainfall at a time when all the NE states recorded a shortfall of average rain.

Mizoram has already made a success story in Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) in the country and the state has more than 25,000 RWH tanks, a fact appreciated by the first citizen of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam during his recent visit to the state.

RWH is a viable technique, that has been practised regularly for about two decades by the Mizos with the help of Public Health Engineering (PHE) department.

Talking to UNI PHE Chief Engineer J P Sinha said since inception of the department in 1983, the government took RWH scheme under the centrally sponsored technology mission, which was implemented in villages having a paucity of alternative water sources.

supply water by gravity flow.

Even though the government has not made RWH system mandatory for every house, the project was successful due to the people's involvement.

''Our department is involved at all stages of the various RWH projects activity across the region. These include assessment, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and operation and maintenance all free of cost,'' said Mr Sinha.

''We concentrated on increasing our support to difficult geographical locations and to serve especially the rural people.

''In the beginning, we started our RHW project by constructing 15,000 litre water tank in targeted villages, where gutters are provided to connect and collect rain water from the roofs of individual houses,'' Mr Sinha explained, adding problems, however, arose because there was no way to keep a tab on the amount of water utilised by a particular member of the group or a family.

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