Water, water, every well

The fast depletion of groundwater can be countered effectively only by rainwater harvesting, learns Michael Patrao, after meeting Michael Sadanand Baptist, a small farmer from Chikmagalore.

Adversity can often lead to despair. But in some cases adversity can lead to innovation and invention as in the case of Michael Sadanand Baptist, a small farmer from Chikmagalore.

Baptist has a small farm of 5 acres of agriculture land five km away from Chikmagalore, where he grows arecanut and horticultural produce like sapota and mango. He sunk 28 borewells in various places in his farm, but all of them failed. He could pump very little water and that too at intervals.

But Baptist did not despair. In 2002 he adopted the conventional method of recharging borewells. He dug a 10ft x 10 ft tank and filled it with filtering materials including charcoal, sand and small granite stones. He realised that the percolation rate of water was very slow and there was overflow of water which went a waste.


Baptist then experimented with a 5 ft x 15 ft tank with only the top 2 ft of filtering material, leaving the rest of the tank space for storage and percolation of water. He was able to harvest more rainwater and as a result all his borewells got recharged with continuous flow of water when pumped.

“Since this situation gave us impetus to improve this harvesting system in the most economic and scientific manner, we took to this profession so that we could lend better services to farmers,” he says. Michael, along with his partner Vijayraj, set up the Farmland Rainwater Harvesting System which has, for the past four years, recharged over 2,000 borewells across the State, in addition to over 1,000 roof top rainwater harvesting.
Michael saw an opportunity in the water shortage faced by Karnataka. As per the recent survey conducted by the Government of Karnataka, there are more than 2.7 million borewells in the State. The water in these borewells are either declining by the day or drying up completely.

At present, the borewell depth ranges from 200 ft to 1,300 ft in the State. In Kolar, Chitradurga, Bellary and Chennagiri the borewell depth has reached more than 800 ft to 1,300 ft and in parts of Bangalore the depth has reached 1,100 ft. In spite of drilling borewells to these depths the yield in the borewell ranges from 1,500 LPH to 6,500 LPH and moreover, as the depth increases, the quality of water gets worse, besides pumping of water also costs more.

The depletion of underground water has even reached the Malnad region and people are facing water problem in peak summer. In coastal Karnataka, despite adequate rains of about 3,000 mm per annum, during summer days a number of open wells and borewells get dried up.

Rainwater is the purest form of water but when it falls on rooftop or ground, this water gets mixed with dirt particles and becomes polluted. To overcome this problem, Michael and Vijayraj with over five years of experiments and innovation came out with rainwater harvesting filters, which instantly filter the rainwater after it is collected and is an improvement over conventional filters.

The research and development of the duo’s Farmland Rainwater Harvesting System involved studying the pattern of rainfall in rural and urban India, intensity of rainfall, type of houses, pipeline used for rainwater drain outlets, reutilization, recharging of ground water and tube well. It is scientifically designed and built to give long and dependable service.

The roof top water drain pipes (down flow pipes) are joined together and connected to the inlet of rain water filter.

When the rainwater flows by gravity through the inlet of filter and enter the upper housing, it allows the rainwater to flow into the SS-304 filter element in angular motion at specific velocity, which creates cohesive force and segregates dirt particles and clean water individually. Thereby, dirt particles and waste materials are flushed out through the drain outlet, while clean rain water passes through the clean water outlet and gets into the sump, tank, well, bore well or re-charging well.

The Government Higher Primary School, Allampura, just 5 km away from Chikmagalore, is a model for how successfully rainwater filter works. Filtered water gets collected in a tank and students use it with the help of a hand pump. The project was executed under the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj.