To address the issue of water crisis in the national Capital, the Delhi Government has decided to revive the ‘non-functional’ rainwater harvesting systems in schools to recharge groundwater. Around 800 Government-run schools have RWH pits and over 50 per cent of them are non-functional, mostly due to lack of monitoring on part of the previous regime, Delhi Government Education coordinator Amit Mishra said.
“The previous Delhi Government had invested around Rs12 crore on this project, spending around Rs1.5 lakh for the construction of each system. The structure also needs a maintenance amount of Rs4,000 for every site. The entire money seems to have gone to waste,” Mishra alleged. Delhi Government officials said a team comprising engineers, scientists and advisers along with two education coordinators has been formed by Education Minister Manish Sisodia for the exercise.
It will be carried out under the supervision of Rakesh Kumar, scientist and head of National Environmental Engineering Research Institute’s (NEERI) Mumbai centre and a visiting faculty at IIT Bombay, they said. As part of the exercise, the team of engineers and education coordinators will inspect four RWHs in different zones which are non-functional, from Monday.
They will try to find out the faults in the system and make a report along with recommending steps that could be taken to make them functional again, the officials said. “The RWH system captures rainwater and transfers it to an underground pit where it passes through filters like gravel, sand and boulder. The purified water then goes deep down and increases the groundwater level,” said Ankit Srivastava, an environment engineer.