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Accepted Papers - 3.pdf - UNESCO

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National Seminar on Rainwater Harvesting and Water Management 11-12 Nov. 2006, Nagpur<br />

81. Public Awareness on Rain Water Harvesting<br />

- A Case Study in Chennai City<br />

GENERAL<br />

Water is life and blood of our environment and<br />

without water no living being can survive. Water is<br />

finite resource and cannot be replaced/duplicated<br />

and produced on commercial scale. Ground water<br />

is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet.<br />

It immensely contributes to India’s development and<br />

economy. It meets 85% of drinking water needs of<br />

rural India. It sustains 60% of irrigated agriculture<br />

and plays an important role in social equity and<br />

poverty reduction.<br />

The phenomenon of human induced ground<br />

water extraction due to excessive development led<br />

* A. Jebamalar **Dr. G. Ravikumar<br />

ABSTRACT<br />

Any initiative involving the public in a mass scale will be successful only when the<br />

public themselves are consulted and are participating in every process. As the stakeholders,<br />

their involvement has been necessitated, in the recent times, in any water related initiative.<br />

This paper attempts to bring out the importance of public awareness in the implementation<br />

of rain water harvesting. Government, though it represents the public, may not be in a<br />

position to deal with such water related issues out and out by itself. Understanding this,<br />

Tamil Nadu Government made rain water harvesting (RWH) as mandatory by the public.<br />

This paper focuses on public awareness for RWH implementation in Padmavathi Nagar of<br />

Chennai City.<br />

A nondisquised structured questionnaire was prepared in Tamil & English and the<br />

questionnaire survey was conducted at 38 households of the study area. It is a 5 page<br />

questionnaire contains three major parts. The first part is about general information<br />

regarding the resident’s personal details, No. of persons in the family, area of the premises,<br />

soil details, awareness about RWH system and their willingness towards this survey. The<br />

second part contains water resources engineering aspects, with water availability, water<br />

usage, quality of water and the sufficiency of the available water at their premises. The<br />

third part contains the details of the RWH systems like type of the system, features and their<br />

opinion about the RWH systems.<br />

Coding sheet was prepared and the information like awareness about RWH system,<br />

its purpose & its impact, willingness to conduct study and their opinion about RWH were<br />

studied. This will help to study the involvement of the public in implementing RWH system.<br />

to decline in ground water level, resulting in water<br />

scarcity in some areas. There are a lot of impacts<br />

associated with falling water levels such as sea water<br />

intrusion, land subsidence, depletion of surface<br />

water, high pumping cost, etc. So, ground water<br />

resources should be managed in such a way that the<br />

recharge is kept at pace with the with drawls through<br />

artificial recharge of rain water. Hence, artificial<br />

recharging of ground water by Rain Water<br />

Harvesting is the solution to improve ground water<br />

potential in order to maintain the sustainable water<br />

resource.<br />

*Sr.lecturer, Velammal Engg. College, Ambattur, Chennai-66<br />

**Asst. Professor, Centre for Water Resources, College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai – 25<br />

457

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