What is water harvesting?
Answers
Answer:
Rainwater harvesting is the collection and storage of rain, rather than allowing it to run off. Rainwater is collected from a roof-like surface and redirected to a tank, cistern, deep pit, aquifer, or a reservoir with percolation. Dew and fog can also be collected with nets or other tools.
Explanation:
What is Water Hearvesting
It means capturing rain where it falls or capturing the run off in your own village or town. And taking measures to keep that water clean by not allowing polluting activities to take place in the catchment.
Therefore, water harvesting can be undertaken through a variety of ways
Capturing runoff from rooftops
Capturing runoff from local catchments
Capturing seasonal floodwaters from local streams
Conserving water through watershed management
These techniques can serve the following the following purposes:
Provide drinking water
Provide irrigation water
Increase groundwater recharge
Reduce stormwater discharges, urban floods and overloading of sewage treatment plants
Reduce seawater ingress in coastal areas.
In general, water harvesting is the activity of direct collection of rainwater. The rainwater collected can be stored for direct use or can be recharged into the groundwater. Rain is the first form of water that we know in the hydrological cycle, hence is a primary source of water for us. Rivers, lakes and groundwater are all secondary sources of water. In present times, we depend entirely on such secondary sources of water. In the process, it is forgotten that rain is the ultimate source that feeds all these secondary sources and remain ignorant of its value. Water harvesting means to understand the value of rain, and to make optimum use of the rainwater at the place where it falls.
How much water can be harvested?
Urban scenario
The total amount of water that is received in the form of rainfall over an area is called the rainwater endowment of the area. Out of this, the amount that can be effectively harvested is called the water harvesting potential.
Water harvesting potential = Rainfall (mm) x Collection efficiency
The collection efficiency accounts for the fact that all the rainwater falling over an area cannot be effectively harvested, because of evaporation, spillage etc. Factors like runoff coefficient and the first-flush wastage are taken into account when estimated the collection efficiency.
The following is an illustrative theoretical calculation that highlights the enormous potential for water harvesting. The same procedure can be applied to get the potential for any plot of land or rooftop area, using rainfall data for that area..
Consider your own building with a flat terrace area of 100 sq m. Assume the average annual rainf evaporation, then, in one year, there will be rainwater on the terrace floor to a height of 600 mm.
Area of plot = 100 sq. m. (120 square yards)
Height of the rainfall = 0.6 m (600 mm or 24 inches)
Volume of rainfall over the plot = Area of plot x height of rainfall
Assuming that only 60 per cent of the total rainfall is effectively harvested
Volume of water harvested = 36,000 litres (60,000 litres x 0.6)
This volume is about twice the annual drinking water requirement of a 5-member family. The average daily drinking water requirement per person is 10 litres.
Rural scenario
Community based rainwater harvesting in rural areas of India - the paradigm of the past - has in it as much strength today as it ever did before. It is, in fact, only with this rudimentary technology that people are able to survive in water scarce areas. Recognising this fact, our ancestors had learnt to harvest water in number of ways:
They harvested the rain drop directly. From rooftops, they collected water and stored it in tanks built in their courtyards. From open community lands, they collected the rain and stored it in artificial wells.
They harvested monsoon runoff by capturing water from swollen streams during the monsoon season and stored it various forms of water bodies.
They harvested water from flooded rivers
Assuming that the average Indian population of an Indian village in November 2000 is approximately 1200. India's average rainfall is about 1170 mm. If even only half this water can be captured, though with technology this can be greatly increased, an average Indian village needs 1.12 hectares of land to capture 6.57 million litres of water it will use in a year for cooking and drinking. If there is a drought and rainfall levels dip to half the normal, the land required would rise to a mere 2.24 hectares. The amount of land needed to meet the drinking water needs of an average village will vary from 0.10 hectares in Arunachal Pradesh (average population 236) where villages are small and rainfall high to 8.46 hectares in Delhi where villages are big (average population 4769) and rainfall is low. In Rajasthan, the land required will vary from 1.68-3.64 hectares in different meterological regions and, in Gujarat, it will vary from 1.72-3.30 hectares. And of course any more water the villagers catch can go for irrigation.
Does this sound like an impossible task? Is there any village that does not have this land availability? India's total land area is over 300 million hectares. Let us assume that India's 587,000 villages