Rainwater harvesting at Urdu High School

Urdu High School is located in Vijaypura town near Devanahalli. The student strength is 88. There are 7 teachers. Our interaction started with Nishat Ma'm, the then HM of the school. And as it happens, she was changed and a new HM came in her place. Thankfully, the new HM was as cooperative as her and things moved smoothly. 

The school was facing issues of intermittent water supply issues as the supply from Panchayat was infrequent and the school has to depend on tankers to suffice its' water needs. The school therefore thought that Rainwater harvesting (RWH) could be a good supplemental source at least during monsoon months. 

The school has an existing sump of ~10KL capacity. Earlier thought was to connect the rooftop pipes directly to the existing sump via a filter. However, the school was a little skeptical about rainwater for drinking. Hence, a suggestion was made to first connect the rooftop rainwater pipes to the rainbarrel via the filter with an overflow option given to the existing sump. The rainbarrel is provided with a tap. Thus, in some exceptional cases when the rooftop water quality is not upto the mark, the overflow connection to the sump can be cut off and the mixing is stopped. 

The system looks like as below:

 

 

 

In this school as well, the handwash was not working properly and it was getting clogged. Therefore, handwash was fixed. The teachers also pointed us to the fact that the handwash was a little higher for the kids to access therefore a step was added to make the access easier. Furthermore, the teachers also mentioned that monkey menace exists in the area. Thus, some pipes were given extra support with iron rods and clamps to give some strength. Time will only tell if this prevents the breakage or not!

Implementation in every school is a different ball game. While doing the implementation work, our plumber saw that a pregnant woman was struggling to climb up since the floor was at a height for her. Kudos to Manjunath for observing this and pointing us to it. He added a step on the ground so that she and others with similar issues can climb it easily. And like we believe, RWH implementation is not about giving access to water but also about understanding the issues faced by school- this time it was Maternal health!