Analysis of Rainwater Harvesting Method for Supply of Potable Water: A Case Study of Gosaba, South 24 Pargana, India

Abstract

In Gosaba, a village on the outskirts of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India, people experience a lot of problems related to shortage of potable water due to salinity and arsenic contamination in the supplied water. Rapid growth of industrialization, increased population, saline water intrusion etc. is causing a decrease in fresh water. Due to overuse of groundwater, GWT is declining rapidly in the Gosaba region. Moreover, seawater is intruding into the groundwater, causing pollution of surface water and a rise in Fe content, Cl content, arsenic content and salinity content in groundwater of that location. The runoff available from that amount of received precipitation is estimated using two empirical equations derived by Sir Aiexander Binnie; Ingels-De Souza and T.G. Barlow and the calculation confirms a good amount of runoff that can be utilized for harvesting in order to decrease the water scarcity of the location. The scarcity of fresh water in the Gosaba location can be minimized by adopting the rainwater harvesting (RWH) method, a sustainable process to obtain disinfected water at a very low cost. The technical part of the present study is to adopt RWH where rainwater is collected from rooftop of an institute building and to design tank where water can be stored and utilized further at minimum costs.