The Group of 77 (G-77) have approved a multi-lateral collaborative project on ‘Sustainable Rainwater Harvesting and Ground Water Recharge in Developing Countries - HRD and Technology Transfer’ for implementation by the NAM S&T Centre over a 3-year period with partial support under the Perez-Guerrero Trust Fund (PGTF) for Economic and Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries.
With the ever-increasing population, migration of vast multitudes of rural population to urban centres and development of industrial towns, the developing countries are facing great pressure on the existing infrastructure on conventional water supply systems and severe constraints on financial and material resources. Municipal water supply in most cities is unreliable and many villages in the developing countries do not have potable water supply. Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) is evidently an ideal sustainable solution, entailing the collection of rain in a scientific and controlled manner for future use
from open areas such as paved ways, parks, roads, and fields into lakes and ponds and roof top water harvesting.
An imbalance in the ground water reserves is created at places where the withdrawal of water is more than the rate of recharge. Recharging of aquifers is now done to maintain or augment natural groundwater as an economic resource, conserve excess surface water underground, combat progressive depletion of groundwater levels and counter unfavourable salt balance and saline water intrusion. Ground Water Recharge (GWR) aids in considerably increasing the water quality as also the water table in real life situations.
The project approved by G-77 proposes an integrated RWH/GWR effort to resolve the water shortage problem in conventional water supply systems. It aims at capacity building through human resource development and technology transfer by holding a training programme on RWH and GWR for the professionals from the participating countries after finalizing a state-of-the-art report in these areas, who in turn would train several field level technicians each year in their respective countries. Bhutan, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Myanmar, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Zambia are among the countries, which have presently accorded consent to participate in this collaborative project.
For more information, please contact
Prof. Arun P. Kulshreshtha
Director
Centre for Science & Technology of the Non-Aligned and other Developing Countries (NAM S&T Centre), Core 6A, 2nd Floor, India Habitat Centre
Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003 (India)
Ph: +91-11-24645134 or 24644974
Fax: +91-11-24644973
E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Website: www.namstct.org
