Rainwater Harvesting – Nepal – ech2o newsletter snippet

This report from Al Jazeera highlights three ground-breaking examples from Nepal which support rainwater collection and use it to mitigate against water shortages. For the past four years in Nepal, Liwali residents have been collecting rainwater through a system of pipes connected to the zinc sheet roofs of shacks built as temporary housing after the earthquakes of 2015. The water is stored in a 106,000-litre underground tank, filtered and dispensed through a set of taps, and evenly shared among nearly 100 households, each of whom gets 40 litres every other day. While the water from the plant is free, each user donates 100 rupees ($1) per month to cover the cost of electricity to run the filter pump. The cost is far less than buying water from private vendors, who usually charge about 40 rupees for 20 litres. Meanwhile, in the country’s southeast, the sub-metropolitan city of Dharan offers a 40 percent rebate on construction permit fees to anyone who installs a water collection pit while building a house, to help replenish groundwater. And the midwestern city of Pokhara is paying farmers to construct plastic-lined ponds to catch monsoon runoff and save it for irrigation during dry periods. Farmers are able to produce off-season vegetables since the retention ponds enable irrigation even in the dry season. The city provides about 300,000 rupees ($2,500) towards each pond constructed.