Mizoram to make every rain drop to count

Aizawl, Nov 05 (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 received 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 village areas in the absence of other drench sources that could 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.

These areas include places far from the road head and the inner terrian, where the easy access of groundwater is difficult,'' he added.

''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 would be accused of taking more water than ought to be their fair share, especially during the dry season.

Mr Sinha further said to counter the problem of providing equal share of water to everyone, the department had constructed a family-dedicated tank of 7,500 litre capacity, which was made of better cold rolled galvanised steel(bacteria free) at a cost ranging between Rs 13,000 to Rs 20,000 depending upon the quality of material used.

Mr Sinha also mentioned that the PHE department is also involved in instituting control mechanisms to monitor quality of rain water by capturing run-off from rooftops, capturing run-off from local catchments, capturing seasonal flood water from local streams and conserving water through watershed management, throughout the region.

A new 160-crore project under Bharat Nirman scheme has also been submitted to the Central Government, he said adding the four-year comprehensive scheme would ensure that all the villages in the state are covered under RWH system by 2009.

Public Works Department (PWD) and National Building Construction Corporation(NBCC) officials too stated that now-a-days they had started laying emphasis on installing RWH system in every new building under their construction projects.

Various colleges in the state had also started to lead an example of how to save water by effective RWH system in their premises.

''To create awareness among the students about the 'value of water' our college started constructing RWH systems since 1993,'' Aizawl Theological college principal Rev. Dr H Vanlalauva said adding that at present it has eleven RWH tanks, with the capacity of more than a lakh litres, in the college premise.

UNI