Water Harvesting: Importance, Its Techniques

Rainwater harvesting, in its broadest sense, is a technology used for collecting and storing rainwater for human use from rooftops, land surfaces, or rock catchments. The rainwater harvesting system incorporates multiple components that are employed at different stages to facilitate the transportation, filtering, and storage of rainwater. The various constituents comprising a rainwater harvesting system include catchments, coarse mesh, gutters, conduits, first-flush, filters, and storage tanks. Water harvesting methods comprise water harvesting in situ which includes contour farming, strip cropping, live beds, vegetative hedges, tied ridging, broad bed and furrows, dead furrows, bunds (contour and graded), compartmental bunds, and terracing. Another method for rainwater harvesting is runoff harvesting, which has again different methods according to arid and semi-arid regions. In arid areas, runoff farming, water spreading, and microcatchments are practiced, whereas in semi-arid areas, dug wells, tanks, minor irrigation tanks, nala bunds and percolation tank, stop dams, and farm ponds are used. Water harvesting techniques are inter-plot water harvesting, inter-row water harvesting, and water harvesting in farm ponds.