Tribune News Service

Faridabad, January 21
Rainwater harvesting, so far ignored in this town, is likely to get a boost with the completion of the city’s Metro Rail Project. The project is likely to recharge underground water significantly and that is good news for this perennially thirsty city. Faridabad’s water requirement exceeds supply by around one billion litres.

Besides providing a smooth and ultramodern way of commuting, the Metro rail would also harvest water through a system installed at all railway stations and the project depot, District Town Planning Department sources reveal. Some 40 rainwater harvesting systems with multi-lakh litre capacity are proposed.

The idea is to prevent even a single drop of rainwater from going to waste. Faridabad citizens usually curse monsoon rains on account of flooded streets and waterlogged localities – if rainwater harvesting is implemented on a wide scale they will bless the rains instead.

As for the rainwater and the Metro, the calculations are like this: The Metro rail here would be 13.875 km long from Badarpur border to YMCA Chowk and will have 13 stations and one depot -cum workshop in Sector 20 here. “This is perhaps the largest project in terms of water harvesting as all the systems installed in various government and semi-government owned projects or buildings had much smaller systems or had been completely missing as the authorities had paid little attention to this issue,” claimed an official in the District Town Planning Department.

The Metro project will help to augment the supply by around two lakh litres, it is claimed.

“The water woes of this industrial city are as old as the city was itself,” remarked DP Sharma, a retired government official here. He said while the majority of the residential areas including the posh sectors of the city were mainly dependent on the rickety tubewell supply network, many of the areas were getting brackish water. The problem remained unsolved despite claims of the civic body to be working on the much anticipated Ranney well water project.

“Lack of adequate and potable water in the city has given birth to a water mafia and suppliers of packaged drinking water , which was worth several hundred crore each year,” said RK Gupta, a resident of Sector 7 here. Claiming that while the RO system and water supply companies were having a booming business, the civic body he said had ignored the rain water harvesting concept so far.

On other hand, Ramesh Bansal, the Executive Engineer of the Municipal Corporation Faridabad claimed that work on 493 crore water project was on and it was likely to make the city water surplus in a few months.