The communities in Elcot Avenue-Kumaraswami Nagar in Sholinganallur have the advantage of being sandwiched between two waterbodies, one on the Perumbakkam side and the other on the Classic Homes side.
While that in itself led to flooding in 2015, it served as the opportunity to harvest water during Vardah, a year later. It is also important to note that these places have a large clayey layer which takes quite an effort for the water to percolate and improve the water table.
Here is where rainwater harvesting assumes significance and where we have a tremendous opportunity to make this community entirely self-dependent.
At The Central Park South, one of the gated communities in this section of Sholinganallur, our recent initiatives began by getting in touch with Sekar Raghavan, better known as the “Rain Man” of Chennai and who runs an organisation called “Rain Centre”.
He paid a visit to our community and carried out an audit of our water management assets, including the various treatment plants, the water sources and the rainwater harvesting facilities.
Based on this audit, we undertook the following sets of activities.
Taking an inventory
A systematic collation and documentation of all water assets including marking them clearly and computing their capabilities. We now have a fully documented water assets map. An interesting point is that we also discovered a borewell which had been wrongly thought of as a rainwater harvesting pit. Getting such an inventory in place helps resolve many communication issues and make more objective decisions.
Deepening two pits
We figured out that the rainwater pits which were put in place by the builder were not adequate for the water to go beyond the clayey surface and were merely serving as stagnant water storage pits. As an initial pilot, we have now deepened two of the pits to about 15 feet from the existing four-feet levels.
Digging a well
We also undertook the digging of a well next to an existing borewell. As you may be aware, while borewells present a simple way to extract water from the water tables, it is important to have a water harvesting mechanism to keep this flush. The well serves as both a harvesting opportunity as well as a source of water. The same principle was applied a couple of years ago, where the Association had undertaken to dig a well which is serving us well today with approximately six thousand litres of water a day.
Measuring water quality
Currently we are in the process of measuring the quality of water of the various water sources (borewells/wells) as well as the treatment plants to make sure they are functioning in line with what is expected. This is likely to shape a full set of future actions that we want to implement quickly so that we can better harvest the monsoon of 2017 and beyond. Over the last few years, our Association has carried out several important activities like repairing our sewage treatment plan so that we don’t contaminate the water bodies nearby by releasing untreated water.
Recent water analysis by experts showed zero microorganisms in our STP water. However, we are just getting started. There is plenty more to do.
(Sumitha Iyer is a resident of The Central Park South)
