Make rainwater harvesting mandatory to save Dhaka

Architects and housing experts on Saturday called for enactment of a law to make rainwater harvesting mandatory to save the capital city from sinking and also face its growing water crisis.
They told a seminar that the use of too many deep tube-wells was rapidly depleting the groundwater table which could cause subsidence or the ground could sink exposing the city population and buildings to an unprecedented disaster.
They called for making it mandatory for every big building to have, now onwards, the built in facilities for rainwater harvesting to recharge the groundwater or for storing rainwater.
Rainwater, they said, could meet 15 per cent of the capital’s total water requirement and at the same time recharge the aquifer, depleting due to pumping out of groundwater that meets 87 per cent of the city’s water supply requirement.
The seminar on ‘Urban Rainwater Harvesting for Domestic Use and Groundwater Recharge’ was jointly hosted by the Institute of Architects Bangladesh and WaterAid Bangladesh.
Speaking as chief guest, state minister for science and ICT Yeafesh Osman, himself an architect, said that the government would take effective measures for storing rainwater and recharging groundwater to solve the water crisis facing the in the city.
‘We have wasted much time. We can do it and will make it possible. It is time to turn around,’ said Yeafesh.
The groundwater level in Dhaka is going down with sinking more and more deep tube wells, said experts,
They also said that with virtually no open space left, and the city getting crammed with too many buildings, it was increasingly hampering the natural recharge of the aquifer by rainwater.
Architects Mustapha Khalid and Qazi M Arif of IAB presented in a keynote paper called for amending the building code and the local government law to make rainwater harvesting mandatory in the city for facing its growing water shortage. All of it should take place, they said, under a new and well defined policy.
They said that no groundwater can be lifted from many areas in Mirpur, Dhanmondi, Mohammadpur and Old Dhaka, due to depletion of the water table by Dhaka WASA, which uses 536 deep tube wells and the private sector users, who sank over 1,200 more tube wells in the city.
They said that the structural design of every big building, now onwards, must provide for built in facilities for rainwater harvesting.
Dhaka WASA chairman Golam Mostafa said that the government should enact a law to make mandatory arrangement for rainwater harvesting in every building in the city.
Depletion of the city’s water table, said RAJUK chairman Nurul Huda, could cause subsidence exposing approximately the city’s 12 lack buildings and over 1.6 crore people to a havoc.
Due to lack of coordination, he said, 54 government bodies, working in the capital, were often repeating the same work.
Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association chief executive Syeda Rizwana Hasan said that the government’s new law as well as rainwater harvesting programmes should give priority to the regions facing desertification and also Chittagong Hill Tracts.
IAB president Mubasshar Hussain and country representative of WaterAid Bangladesh Md Khairul Islam also spoke.

Courtesy of NewAge