With RWH, 2 schools sure of tackling poor monsoon

Nagpur: A couple of big brand schools are well prepared to deal with the water crisis that might hit the city in the coming years in case rains continue to play truant. At least two well-known city schools have invested heavily to make their premises eco friendly by installing massive rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems on their campuses.
Centre Point School (Amravati Bypass Road), winner of the TOI Nagpur Heroes award for its environment friendly initiatives, is currently harvesting a whopping 25 lakh litres of rainwater annually. Arun Upadhyaya, the school’s director, said, “This branch has had RWH system since its inception. A ground-level tank with a capacity of 5 lakh litres was constructed to collect water from the ground with drains leading to the tank. This water is used solely for gardening.”
Upadhyaya added that the water collected on the rooftops is separately channelled to the school’s borewell. “In our Sadar branch of Mothers Pet Kindergarten (MPK), we have had RWH system in place since 30 years as we do not have water coming from the corporation network at all,” said Upadhyaya.
Delhi Public School (Kamptee Road) is collecting the rain water into a mini-pond of sorts at its sprawling campus, while at its Mihan branch a state-of-the-art RWH system stores almost 1 lakh litres of water.
Ajay Mansukhani, pro-vice chairman of the school said, “At Kamptee Road, the campus is on an elevated ground so we constructed an intensive rainwater drainage system which collects water and puts it into this pond. At Mihan, our campus is on a low lying area and there we have built in RWH across the building, open ground etc and collect water in three tanks of approximately 30,000 litres each.”
Mansukhani added that the tanks are connected to each other using the ‘overflow’ system. “The final tank has an auto start pump which does not allow water to overflow and get wasted. It instead channels water through pipes to the canal built across Mihan to collect rainwater,” said Mansukhani.