BENGALURU: In the true spirit of education, universities and colleges in Bengaluru are doing their bit to help recharge groundwater in a city where aquifers are fast depleting, and are involving students in the effort.
This is even before the University Grants Commission suggested in a circular dated June 24 that educational institutions should involve students in setting up rainwater harvesting mechanisms. Some universities, however, are facing setbacks because of inadequate land or labour -- either student volunteers or workers, who are unable to go to campuses due to the pandemic.
Bangalore University has tied up with the Rotary Club to utilise its 1,000-acre -campus to set up check dams and install rainwater harvesting systems on its buildings. Vice-Chancellor K R Venugopal however, says the pandemic has thrown a spanner in the university’s plans of felling 5,000 eucalyptus plants, which, according to some studies, consume a lot of groundwater.
The plan was to replace them with five lakh saplings of other tree varieties. “It is a critical time, but workers are hard to find with several migrants leaving the city. One cannot force labourers to work,” he told TNIE. The 17.5-acre campus of Maharani Cluster University provides an adequate catchment area, but the problem is lack of government assistance to undertake RWH projects, according to an official.
The University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) continues to pursue its ambitious RWH initiative on a catchment area of 1,380 acres -- by setting up percolation pits, storage tanks, and ponds to store water.
“While colleges often cite limited land as an obstacle, it should not prevent them from introducing RWH systems,” Dr K Devaraj, senior scientist of soil and water conservation engineering, at the UAS, said.
Rainwater harvesting is a community initiative through which colleges or individuals can build percolation pits to recharge neighbourhood wells or groundwater, he said. “Just build percolation pits,” he suggested. Pits should be 12 feet deep to be effective, but many people dig a pit of just 5 feet just to comply with BBMP rules. “If each borewell is recharged, considering the 970 mm rains that the city receives, it can cater to the daily needs of a four-member household for the next six months,” he added.