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RWH to be mandatory for new buildings soon

PUDUCHERRY: Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) systems will soon be made mandatory for all new buildings coming up in Puducherry.

Officials of the Puducherry Planning Authority (PPA) said that in order to enforce the installation of RWH systems, the building by-laws will soon be amended and republished with government approval. A special drive will also be launched to persuade house owners to implement RWH in existing structures, the officials added.

The Puducherry government has already set an example. Officials of the Public Works Department (PWD) said that RWH systems had been installed in many government structures such as the Chief Secretariat, the main PWD office, and the government servant quarters in Lawspet and Dr. Ambedkar Nagar.

Apart from the conventional RWH systems installed in buildings, vertical drains have been installed through which stormwater is let into the water table directly.

“Usually, the water collected from our terraces and harvested in conventional systems is relatively clean rainwater. The water collected in the roadside vertical drains, however, is impure, and is likely to pollute the water table. So, the water is first filtered in a chamber underground filled with pebbles and led to the water table from there by means of pipes,” an official of the PWD said.

These drains have been installed in a few places in the town, such as outside the fire service station and in Gorimedu, with the installation of a drain being proposed at the Indira Gandhi statue junction. ‘Bed dams’ have also been constructed across rivers, from which shaft wells to the river bed will help in groundwater recharging, the official said.

Apart from these measures, around 87 village tanks in the various commune panchayats in the Union Territory have been desilted and regenerated for the storing and recharging of groundwater, an official of the PPA said.

“We also hope to hope to implement RWH in institutional campuses, such as Pondicherry University, Pondicherry Engineering College and the Jawaharlal Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) campus. These are big campuses, located in the limestone belt where absorption of water will be high,” the official said.

“Within urban limits, the implementation of RWH will, to a certain extent, curb seawater intrusion,” he said.

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