It is summer, but Panchavathi, a 16-flat complex in Second Main Road, Gandhi Nagar, has little need for private water lorries. For the last four months, this 18-year-old residential unit has been relying on an open well built on its premises.
There was a lot of resistance within the apartment Association to an open well. “Well water is not fit for drinking and will affect your health,” H.U. Zehra recalls the warning that many residents repeated.
It took a lot of persuasion including a lab test by a few other residents to prove the intransigent group wrong. In the last four months, the Association’s monthly expenditure has reduced by at least 50 per cent.
Earlier, over water from 22 tankers were necessary every month. “Now, we have reduced it to 13,” she says.The Association spent around Rs. 70, 000 to de-silt the recharge well, install a new motor and for a few other works. The 23-feet well had 12-feet of water. “Initially, we were drawing six feet of water every day and within 24 hours it would be replenished,” says Zehra, the Association’s secretary.
With ground water table dipping at many places and the likelihood of a water crisis looming large, apartment complexes and independent houses are gradually warming up to the idea of open wells.
But, the awareness is still low in the city. Many choose bore wells over open wells because of space constraints and the time required to dig the latter. Sekhar Raghavan, Director, Rain Centre is planning to have a door-to-door campaign, starting with Gandhi Nagar, to help residents appreciate open wells.
“Many residents are not aware that their groundwater source lies in two discontinuous layers – shallow and deep aquifers. These are separated by the bed [hard] rock, which is at different depths in different parts of the neighbourhood.
For example, in Gandhi Nagar, bedrock is found at around 60 feet below ground level, meaning that the shallow aquifer extends up to that depth. It is this shallow aquifer which gets replenished every year during and after monsoon with all the rainwater harvesting that residents have implemented,” he explains. By digging deep bore wells, many have forgotten the existence of the shallow aquifer. Deep bore-wells extract water from within rocks, which is some kind of a trapped source and which cannot be replenished and sustained by RWH.
To ensure adequate water supply, residents can create an open well. “If they do not have one, they should at least dig a shallow bore well (not more than 50 feet deep) to tap the shallow groundwater source. If they already have a shallow source, they can extract water from it till it gets exhausted, instead of from the deep bore-well,” he says.
The water from the driveway can also be channelised this way.
For details on the campaign, contact Sekhar Raghavan, at 2491 8415 email:sekar1479@yahoo.co.in
