After suffering a drought for almost two years, people of Dedh Sarh village of District Tharparkar 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 organization.

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

Women have to walk two to three kilometers 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; 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. Traditional cone-shaped roofs are converted into  a flat roof, which is connected to an underground tank through a pipe, for storing rain water with convenience.

‘Traditional huts are made with a mixture of clay and cow dung that often make rainwater unhygienic, so we wanted to use cement that is easier to clean,’ explained Suthar.

Earlier, his family would simply use utensils to store water that was manually poured into underground tanks. After revamping his water storage system, Saifal also noticed that water harvested this year is relatively clean.

A few meters away from Saifal’s home, five larger cone-shaped (Chonra) ponds have been constructed where sufficient water is stored to meet the needs of all five neighborhoods of Dedh Sarh. Each tank is connected to a hand pump.

Over 200,000 liters has also been stored in the seven-foot deep Sindh Arid Zone Development Authority (SAZDA) pond and several tarais (natural ponds) of this arid zone, regarded as the most food insecure region of Pakistan by the United Nations. But due to extensive evaporation, the water does not last more than a few months. Keeping this in mind, the Sukaar Foundation has covered open ponds with geomembranes to prevent water loss due to evaporation. Apart from these ponds, all the wells in the district have been recharged as well.

It is too early to predict whether all this water will be sufficient for a year, but the villagers appear quite confident, saying that they are happy they will now have time to attend to other chores in the day.

The government has acknowledged the Sukaar Foundation’s work so far, as made evident by the presence of a former MPA Faqir Sher Mohammad at the inauguration ceremony of the project last week. Fifteen union councils of Tharparkar have also approved the idea of piped roof-water harvesting.

The government has to step forward to provide these basic services at a mass level and learn to harvest rainwater using more practical methods.

Source: Dawn