With the burgeoning urban population putting immense pressure on ground water resources in the State, the Odisha Government has decided to arrest the trend by tapping rain water in cities and towns through rooftop harvesting structures which will help replenish ground water table.
At present, an estimated 40 per cent of urban private water supply is sourced from ground water in Odisha. To reduce the growing pressure, the Water Resources Department has come up with a `100-crore scheme under which Government as well as private buildings will adopt rooftop rainwater harvesting and recharge ground water in urban areas of the State.
The draft scheme has already been submitted to the Finance Department for ratification of the Expenditure Finance Committee. Titled “Rooftop Rainwater Harvesting and Ground Water Recharge Scheme”, the Government plans to bring under its cover 16,955 buildings out of which 550 are Government establishments.
Proposed to be operational from this financial year, the scheme will have a project period of five years during which Rooftop Rainwater Harvesting Systems (RRHS) would be installed in the buildings. The scheme, which would be made available to 103 urban local bodies and two census towns of the State, targets buildings with rooftop area of at least 200 sq metre for mass adoption of the water harvesting structures.
As per the draft scheme, anyone owning a building with a roof of 200 sq metre will be eligible to be covered. The building owners would have to execute the structures at their own cost but will be entitled to subsidy after completion and successful testing of the system by authorised officers. The subsidy for the RRHS will be limited to `45,000 or 50 per cent of the actual investment by the building owner, whichever is less. Simply put, the RRHS designs will capture rainwater run-off from roofs to augment ground water recharge and improve water table as well as quality.
The estimated cost of the structures would vary depending upon the roof size and volume of water to be recharged and stored. On an average, the cost of installing RRHS on a large Government building has been estimated at `3.50 lakh.
A provision of `5 crore is proposed to be made in the budget estimate of Directorate of Ground Water Survey and Investigation (GWS&I) for 2014-15 since it will implement the scheme on behalf of the Water Resources Department.
However, the micro monitoring of the scheme will be done at the ULB level. A committee would be specifically formed for this. The detailed project report for the scheme will be prepared by GWS&I.
The scheme was prepared since the Odisha Ground Water (Regulation, Development and Management) Bill 2011 necessitates mandatory adoption of RRHS in buildings. While Odisha is trying to adopt the model now, many large cities have already adopted RRHS to tackle water scarcity.