Thiruvananthapuram: Three Government hospitals in the district, including the Medical College Hospital, are slated to have rainwater harvesting system in place as part of the World Bank-aided rainwater harvesting programme, `Jalanidhi,' of the State Government.

The system that was being designed for the Medical College Hospital has, however, been stalled and the project, which should have been completed by March 31, is now awaiting technical sanction from the Government.

Officials of the Socio-Economic Unit Foundation, the NGO which has been entrusted with the task of implementing rainwater harvesting and rural water supply schemes with community participation in five districts in the State, said that the new Government would have to issue clearance before work on the project can be taken any further.

The work on rainwater harvesting schemes drawn up for the other two hospitals - the Government Ayurveda College Hospital and the Mental Health Centre - is almost over, they added.

The MCH will have 15 storage tanks with a total of 5.4 lakh-litre capacity installed at various locations on the campus. The estimation is that at least 2,500 litres of rainwater can be tapped over the year from an area of one square meter or rainwater five times the storage capacity can be tapped.

The scheme for MCH can thus store 27 lakh litres of rainwater in a year.

The Central fund - Rs.11.7 lakhs - allotted for the scheme has already been received. But the project has been up against various hurdles, the primary ones being budget constraints and the acute shortage of space. The storage tanks have to be constructed on the ground. The location of storage tanks was changed in between the construction, necessitating the need for re-designing the scheme. Only three of the 15 storage tanks have been put in place now.

The Rs.5.72-lakh scheme in Ayurveda College Hospital will have nine tanks, which can store up to 2.5 lakh litres of rainwater every year while the Mental Health Centre has a smaller scheme at Rs.3 lakhs, which can store 1.3 lakh litres of rainwater annually.

The other side

Even as the Government is going all-out to popularise rainwater harvesting, it is pointed out that the system can be of limited use in hospitals, as these are huge water guzzlers. Rainwater that is collected from two seasonal monsoons in an entire year would be hardly adequate to fulfil even a day's requirement of water in big hospitals.

The MCH, for instance, has a separate KWA line installed and uses about 32 lakh litres of water daily, while the rainwater harvesting system is meant to store up to 27 lakh litres in a year.

In the Ayurveda College Hospital, the daily water requirement is about 4 lakh litres, while its rainwater management system can only store up to 2.5 lakh litres of water in a year.

A rainwater harvesting system is meant for slow and sustainable water use round the year.

Once the stored water has been used up, it will be another four months before the tank can be replenished.

SEUF officials admit that hospitals, where water usage in intensive, might not be the best of places where the potential of rainwater harvesting can be utilised properly. But Government hospitals were chosen as part of the State's campaign to popularise the scheme among the public, they said.

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