Tawanai

Many welcome the downpours every year, which signal the end of another dry summer season. But here, in the Dedh Sarh village of District Tharparkar, the rains are even more welcome as they mean less time spent walking to and from water wells.

After suffering a drought for almost two years, people of this water-stressed village will finally be able to breathe easy as they have stored enough water for 10 months, if not a whole year, during the rainy season. This has been made possible by a pilot rainwater harvesting project set up by the Sukaar Foundation, a local non-governmental organisation.

‘We were able to store up to 150,000 litres of water in the smaller Chonra-shaped ground water tanks and another 75,000 litres in the bigger tanks, which is sufficient for the five neighbourhoods in our village,’ explains Mohammad Saifal, a teacher at a government school and resident of Ali Mohammad neighbourhood in the Dedh Sarh village.

Saifal lives in a joint family comprising 40 members, mostly women, who have to walk two to three kilometres to fetch water from wells, which is often saline. ‘Groundwater is the only source of water for people and livestock in this region. But with the depletion of water tables, the only other option they have is to conserve water when it rains,’ said Ashok Suthar, director of the Sukaar Foundation, who added that the annual rainfall pattern has not been uniform for the past few years, ranging from 50mm to 300mm only.

For that reason, Sukaar picked Saifal’s household to demonstrate its low-cost and effective rainwater harvesting model. Months before the monsoon season started, roofs of a few selected rooms in Saifal’s house were reconstructed using cement.

Via: Dawn

Energy