PUDUKKOTTAI: Necessity is the mother of all inventions, says Plato. One such necessity has driven Sathiyaseelan in Pudukottai to venture out with an idea and give shape to it. Water shortage has been a perennial issue in several areas of Pudukottai, which especially affects the livelihood of farmers. Even good rains could not bring any respite as most of the borewells have no water in them.
This is due to the depletion of groundwater. The rainwater runs down the drain and goes to waste. To prevent this from continuing, and to use rainwater to recharge groundwater level, Sathiyaseelan (28) from the town created a pit. The young engineer from Senthankudi in Alangudi works in Singapore. Having a keen interest and awareness about the environment, Sathiyaseelan always looked for ways to harvest rainwater, recalls his uncle, who owns four acres of land in the village.
Tragedy struck them when cyclone Gaja hit the State in 2018. As many as 500 coconut trees in his lands were uprooted. Along with that, the 300-feet borewell, owned by the family, also did not have any water. This made Sathiyaseelan think and prompted him to read about ways of recharging groundwater. He decided to use an abandoned well (67 feet) for this work.
After taking reference from a few YouTube videos about recharge pits, he took the help of his engineer friend Boopathy and his uncle MK Sundaram. As a team, they zeroed in on a low-lying area, where rainwater would usually stagnate near their well. They built a recharge pit at a distance of about 50 metres from the well. Through the PVC pipes, water from the pit would be channelised into the well.
“The recharge pit has three layers to filter the rainwater and is 1.5 feet deep. The pipe, which goes from the pit to the well is placed on a slope and its mouth gets wider as it reaches close to the well. Sand and dirt get filtered by two nylon mesh layers in the pit. I did this as a trial in February this year. The results we achieved last week were encouraging,” beams Sathiyaseelan.
In the last two weeks, when the village witnessed heavy rains, the well almost got 80 per cent full, thanks to the pit. This well had not been used in the last 40 years. Sathiyaseelan is hopeful that as the process continues, the groundwater level would rise. After seeing the success of the pit, 44 friends of Sathiyaseelan from the same village, who all work in Singapore, are now planning to build such pits for their wells.“I hope the government considers this idea,” says his uncle Sundaram.