'Scalability and replicability are two words that should be abandoned,' says Vishwanath Srikantaiah of Rainwater Club

For Gayathri, water was starting to get scarce. The rainwater table was drying, and this was evident from parched borewells in the neighbourhood. Between acute water scarcity and the reign of the water tanker mafia, Bangaloreans are the only ones losing out. “One day, we saw rain charging down the driveway mixing with sewage. That’s when I called Shubha, from Rainwater Club. Ours is a small plot, so there’s no place for a well. So we decided to collect rain on the roof. It gets filtered and filled into a tank.”

It’s as simple that. Even now, Gayathri says, most of the rainwater flows over their garage into the driveway. “But it’s amazing,” she says. “For 16-21 days, at a stretch, we use the rainwater we harvested.” Eventually, Gayathri made the decision to close her corporation connection. For those still skeptical about rainwater, she says, “How much more natural can you get? We keep the terrace clean, and we have a filter with four layers of charcoal.”

In the same city, Jannappa saw borewell after borewell drying up and failing to provide water for the houses around his. For him, it wasn’t a choice borne out of a higher environmental awareness. He laughs and says, “There was no water. It was needed.” But, now, he swears by rainwater harvesting . “After some time, the borewell gradually started re-charging,” he says. Excited with the success of his unit, he decided to construct an open well ‘downstream,’ which collected more rainwater. He says he’s collected more than 25,000 litres of rainwater in the sump. That has piqued the interest of his neighbours who’re starting to believe rainwater harvesting is literally the only option available for a parched city.

Shubha Ramachandran feels we can do better with our water, too. She repeats the same number S. Vishwanath, a columnist for The Hindu, has often repeated in essays and lectures: Bangalore’s 3,000 million litres of rainfall needs to be harvested. In ’95, Vishwanath started the Rainwater Club, a notional entity. “People wanted a turn key solution,” says Shubha, for rainwater harvesting, waste water treatments like biological remediation, but one that was cheap. In 2007, they incorporated Biome Environment Solutions and set up the Biome Environmental Trust in 2010 to help fund research, advocacy and implementation in the poorer regions of Karnataka.

For the poorer folks that Rainwater Club has helped, Vishwanath speaks of excited calls from women -who boast of water tanks that are full to the brim- from Hoskere and Kurubarahalli where Rainwater Club has worked with rural families.

Vishwanath adds: “In rural Karnataka, community structures are weak, and, much as we wish, we still need to give them support. The stronger communities take over infrastructure easily; the weaker ones need time. But that’s the way it is. We will support what we invest, and make sure it doesn’t become a dead investment.”

Additionally, because groundwater is highly contaminated with chloride in rural areas, villagers prefer drinking harvested rainwater, whereas, city dwellers are more comfortable using this water for washing and cleaning. So harvesting units are built keeping this in mind, besides climate conditions and hydro-geology. The units also need to be modified to account for poorer maintenance.

In 2009, the Karnataka government made rainwater harvesting mandatory in Bangalore. That increased the supply and demand for harvesting and treatment services. Guidelines were made, strategies were chartered out and the market expanded. Shubha says Rainwater Club and Biome were instrumental in framing the policy, yet, implementation continues to be poor compared to Tamil Nadu, where rainwater harvesting has been implemented far more successfully. Shubha believes if the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Pollution Control Board (PCB), Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Board (BWSSB) and Lake Development Authority (LDA) had greater cooperation and coordination amongst them, government programmes could be better implemented with the additional assistance of community watchdogs. But creating a system and an environment in which that system can thrive, in a chaotic city like Bangalore, is difficult. Vishwanath says that corporations approach them for environmental compliance. Schools and homes that ask for their assistance usually have an environmental bent. Yet, in urban areas, people, he says, are finicky and fastidious when it comes to adopting rainwater harvesting. It’s not always the government’s fault when public programmes fall short of expectations. Simply put, villagers tend to ask “How?” and city dwellers are more inclined to ask “Why?”.

There are communities that have adopted rainwater harvesting. Two years ago, a housing community near Meenakshi temple, Bannerghatta decided to implement the Rainwater Club’s solutions. Jyothi, a resident, says the units were installed on the club house rooftop. “It was a community effort, as we don’t have individual borewells for each house. It’s shared, so there was a huge scarcity of water. Now we’ve seen improved water output in the borewell after rainwater harvesting. We cannot, of course, quantify it ourselves, but this is from observation.”

More recently, though, Rainwater Club has started a new project called Participatory Ground Water Project to understand aquifers in the city. It’s a localised study of ground water resources in areas like Sarjapur Road and Bellandur junction. The government agency officially in charge of these studies is the Central Ground Water Board. But its work is largely restricted to studying ground water issues at a regional level. So while they have information on water tables in north Karnataka, they can’t say the same about locational pinpoints in cities like Indiranagar or Thippasandra. However, the biggest problem is the lack of information, or poor access to it. There is no single place where highly localised data on climate, pollution, STPs, water table and other indicators is available on the Internet. The most accessible data streams come from private researchers and NGOs. Even the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and LDA do not make the detailed project reports on lakes available online. “What the official policy is – I don’t know,” says Shubha, “but people are really looking for relevant information online.”

Shubha says that if all of Bangalore can efficiently harvest its rainwater, then there wouldn’t be such an acute dependency on ground water. She says Rainwater Club will proclaim success only when they see a noticeable rise in water table across Bangalore.

Vishwanath says, “We as intellectuals and people who read too much tend to get frustrated. But there’s an assimilation pace which is sub-optimal, but it’s the way it is. So one may be a bit impatient; we’re accepting the pace of change. What we do more specifically isn’t to look at the number of projects we do, but the number of people we’ve capacitated to solve their own problems.” Vishwanath feels India isn’t ready to get on what he calls the ‘social entrepreneurship bandwagon.’ He says, “Scale and replicability are two words which should be abandoned from our dictionary.” According to him, highly localised solutions that aren’t necessarily profit-oriented are the best way to go forward for a country that’s trying to build itself on a fractured foundation. “For us,” he says, “it is to understand local communities, and find appropriate answers for themselves. That’s the way we look at it.”