

Rainwater Harvesting to Replenish Underground Water in Rajasthan, India - grok2
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-rajasthan-rainwater-harvest-restoration-groundwater-johad.html

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ssivark
Chennai in India is considered another success story for rainwater harvesting.
It should be noted that there was much whining and hand-wringing about the
costs of setting this up. But the situation got kinda bad about a decade ago,
and there was an ordinance from the state government that every building must
have the requisite facilities. The situation turned around within a few years,
and the water situation is much much better now.

Here are a few (semi-random) articles about that:

1\. [http://www.thealternative.in/society/i-started-to-do-rwh-
in-...](http://www.thealternative.in/society/i-started-to-do-rwh-in-chennai-
for-selfish-reasons-sekhar-raghavan/)

2\.
[http://www.auick.org/database/apc/apc044/apc04403.html](http://www.auick.org/database/apc/apc044/apc04403.html)

3\. [http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/tamil-nadus-water-
revolution-...](http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/tamil-nadus-water-
revolution-402085)

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jeza
Interesting topic. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO), Australia has been looking into the usage of aquifers
for water storage in urban areas for some time now (the most recent project
was Managed aquifer recharge and storm water
[http://www.csiro.au/en/Research/LWF/Areas/Resilient-
cities/U...](http://www.csiro.au/en/Research/LWF/Areas/Resilient-cities/Urban-
water/MARSUO) from 2010 to 2014, though I remember reading reports about some
research around 15 years ago).

I think it is particularly interesting that their research is focused on urban
areas, where all the concrete and bitumen results in huge runoff. This creates
risk of flash flooding, wastes a useful resource and even causes problems for
marine life. So if it can be stored underground in natural aquifers and
utilised locally that'd be quite an improvement. Apparently the cost of
treating storm water for drinking is similar to treatment of water from
reservoirs. No doubt there'd be a pretty big saving infrastructure needed for
distributing water over long distances as well.

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tomcam
A stunning environmental victory, if true. And in case the bureaucratic hand
in India sounds heavy, it is probably worse here in the Land of the Free:
[http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-
resourc...](http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-
resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx)

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iwwr
Apparently, that practice is still banned in some US states and counted as
'water theft'.

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sudeepj
Do u mean that one cannot store rainwater at all in US (some states)? Did not
know that.

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tomohawk
It's great to see this kind of grass roots triumph. Hopefully, this will
prevent a water monopoly
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire)).

