Rain water harvesting

Recharge of wells and ground waters

The following is the extract from an email sent by Sachin Jadhav in June 2016
(Phone no. 7066965121 Email ID. sachindj@gmail.com)

Rain water harvesting is very easy. It must be made compulsory for every building
in the city and every village.
Current municipal format for harvesting rain water only requires one to dig soak
pits which is not very efffective. It does a very nominal amount of water harvesting.
Water percolation through the soil happens very slowly. Water to reach 300 feet
deep aquifers can take many years by using this method. The fastest and most
effective way is direct tubewell recharge by rain water.
I myself was completely against digging a tubewell or a borewell. However, I could
not persuade other people against doing so. I understand that water is a basic need
for everyone, and is needed for consumption by a household or a farm or an
industrial unit. It is every persons right to have water as a right to live. (Jeevan as
they say)
Studying the strata and water aquifers at Mumbai, Konkan, Satara and in my inlaws place in Sangli gave me a fair understanding about how water flows and is
stored in the ground. It was indeed an amazing learning. I will share about this
sometime later.
For the quick answer to all those who want to have abundant water, I will say......
Dig tubewells, as deep as you want and as many as you want. Well, isn't that a
surprise! The deeper you go, more the water you can save.
Here is what you do. (For open wells there will minor modifications to this. I will
write more about this later).
1. Dig a soak pit of min 6 x 6 x 6 feet around your tubewell.
2. Cut the existing pvc pipe of top 5 and half feet from the top and replace that
with
perforated pipe
commonly
available
in
the
market.

3.

4.
5.
6.
7.

8.
9.

OR
drill many holes to this same 5 and half feet pipe.
Now, if the soil of the walls of the soak pit is loose or is not strong enough (it
should be strong enough if there is lot of clay content in the soil i.e. more
than 30%), then you may want to build brick walls or build the walls with
readymade concrete sheets. This will prevent the soil from getting into the
tubewell. Make sure that this brick wall is min 6 inch higher than your
ground so that the murky ground water does not go in.
After this, start filling the soak pit with large stones of min 3 inch size (you
can get this from any constuction material provider). Fill it 1 feet in depth.
Above that fill 2 inch size of stones, filling it for a feet and
Then fill 1 inch size of stone for 1 more feet.
Now fill 2 feet of small pebbles of half an inch size. (I commonly use broken
bricks or large charcoal pieces for additional filteration layer but that is not
compulsory)
Thats it! We are ready to connect your roof top pipe to this soak pit.
Make sure that you do not take in first few days of rainwater to keep the
water clean.

Because of the rain water havesting in my society in Mumbai, now has 24/7
running water. They use very nominal amount of municipal water. The electricity
bill has also reduced to half for pumping water since water is very clean. This
water had an odour before but now is clean and sweet.
In villages or on your farm you can connect a tubewell directly to the open well
with simple pipe connections. And directly transport clean water in the tube well
during the monsoon. No soak pits are required. This way you can save lot of money
and time and the clean water will be available in the summer months.
Please refer to the images below for reference. Have fun making the world a better
place with abundance.