The Tharpar­ket dis­trict of Pak­istan has many water prob­lems. The area has no rivers, wells are con­trolled by an elite minor­ity, there is a lot of nasty water, and it’s one of the dri­est parts on the coun­try. A local NGO is team­ing up with the United Nations to try to solve the district’s water issues.

From the IRIN, we read more of the water project to help the 900,00 peo­ple who live in the area.

How­ever, an inno­v­a­tive project by local NGO Thard­eep Rural Devel­op­ment Pro­gramme (TRDP) in con­junc­tion with the World Food Pro­gramme (WFP) and the Gov­ern­ment of Sindh is help­ing alle­vi­ate Tharparker’s drought problems.

Fol­low­ing a sur­vey con­ducted jointly by the UN children’s agency (UNICEF) and TRDP in 1998, which iden­ti­fied the potable water issues faced in Tharparker, the con­cept for the Rain Water Har­vest Project (RWHP) was born.

The idea was to enable vil­lagers to col­lect rain­fall, which is gen­er­ally lim­ited to a short annual mon­soon sea­son, store it and use it through­out the year.

“Given decreas­ing lev­els of rain­fall as well as deplet­ing water tables, it is impor­tant that we focus on con­ser­va­tion. RWHP allows us to store drink­ing water as well as replen­ish the water table,” Jhu­man Lalchan­dani, a senior man­ager at TRDP’s Com­mu­nity Phys­i­cal Infra­struc­ture Unit, said.
…

Keep­ing low cost inter­ven­tion in mind, RWHP has pro­vided some 1,350 vil­lages and set­tle­ments out of 2,100 with under­ground water stor­age tanks since 2000.

“At the moment, we have three types of RWH projects, which include rain water har­vest­ing at house­hold lev­els, also known as cis­terns or tankas; at ham­let level ponds are used for sav­ing water for the com­mu­nity; and at the vil­lage level we have delay action dams. Also, in low-lying areas, flood pro­tec­tion walls not only save houses from get­ting flooded but also allow for water to pool up and be used for other pur­poses,” said Lalchandani.

He said the aver­age fam­ily of six to seven peo­ple in Tharparker needed around 10–12 litres of drink­ing water a day just for drink­ing and cook­ing. The cost of cement and mate­ri­als to make a cis­tern with a capac­ity of about 2,000 litres is less than PKR 1,000 (US$12). Twenty per­cent of that cost is paid by the house­hold receiv­ing the cis­tern in the form of in-kind labour over the three to four days in takes to dig and con­struct a cistern.

“Each house is given a catch­ment area and from there the rain water is chan­neled to cis­terns. As of June 2009, at the house­hold level RWHP cov­ers 92,415 homes with the num­ber of ben­e­fi­cia­ries being 406,833, with 219,896 of them being women,” Lalchan­dani said.

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