1. Navin Chandra, Mumbai 

Chandra is 93 years old, but that does not stop him from actively encouraging his building residents to embrace sustainable solutions for saving water.

Intrigued by the number of water tankers making their way into the society, Chandra convinced every resident of the building to invest in a rainwater harvesting facility, solar panels, a windmill, and a composting pit.

At the time of this interview, the residents recounted saving a minimum of 2 lakh litres of water every monsoon.

2. Subhajit Mukherjee, Mumbai

Mukherjee’s innovation — a low-cost rain harvesting and groundwater recharge system — is built using PVC pipes and a water barrel/drum.

An underground pit stores the water falling into it from the terrace, thus reviving the groundwater table.

Subhajit, founder of the city-based NGO Mission Green Mumbai, has also created a system that can help save thousands of litres of water across schools and colleges in the city, by storing the water for 10 days.

3. M Veeramani, Tamil Nadu

Veeramani devised a system where the rainwater landing on the roof of his house would get collected in a nearby old well through pipes.

He opened up the well, dug down to 15 feet, and added a concrete frame around it. He also designed channels on either side of the roof from where the water flows into the pipes and empties into the well, which has a capacity of 18,000 litres.

Veeramani uses the water to irrigate his four-acre farm and for household purposes. After observing his work, many others in the village have also taken inspiration from this model of rainwater harvesting.

4. Vaibhav Singh, Uttarakhand

Villages situated in the Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand get their water supply from nearby springs. But over the past few years, locals have been complaining about water shortages.

Ever since Singh’s tenure in the region in 2019, he came up with a plan to construct water-retention and soil-preserving structures like chal kahls (‘water ponds’ in Garhwali), contour trenches, check dams, and percolation pits.

Singh and his forest staff have constructed over 887 chal kahls with each structure having a water-holding capacity ranging from 10,000 to 2,50,000 litres.

5. Soumya Prasad, Dehradun

Soumya Prasad, an ecologist, has not paid an electricity or water bill for the last three years. “We get dry spells for about 15 days in the year. Most of the rainwater gets mixed with sewage and thus wasted,” she says, adding that because cemented roads do not catch the water, it results in a deluge.

The underground rainwater harvesting tank she set up in her home can store up to 20,000 litres of rainwater, sufficing the needs of around seven people.

The captured rainwater is filtered and then used for both potable and non-potable needs. The family has stopped taking water from the administration completely. The surplus water recharges groundwater tables.

6. Utkarsh Upadhyaya and Nishant Kumar, Jharkhand

The duo started Blue Elixir to address water shortage problems by providing conservation solutions by installing rainwater harvesting systems and wastewater treatment systems.

At the time of this interview, the duo claimed to have helped conserve close to 90 million litres of water through their rainwater harvesting systems, while treating over 1.5 billion litres of water.

Every project is started with a feasibility survey where the size of the rooftop is assessed and potential recharge zones decided upon. Each project takes anywhere from 10 days to four months to complete.

7. Uma Maheshwara, Bengaluru

The Karnataka native has spent over a decade installing over a thousand rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems across the city in an effort to improve the city’s water situation.

A plumbing contractor working with the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), Uma set an example by building his own rainwater harvesting system in his home in 2007 with a one-time investment of Rs 10,000.

As he notes, “Since then I have not only been saving lakhs of money but also have saved 20 tankers worth of water every single year. That roughly amounts to almost 1 lakh litres of water every year.”

8. Dr Sekhar Raghavan, Chennai

Popularly called Chennai’s ‘Rain Man’, Raghavan has been working to encourage rainwater harvesting in the city for decades. In 1995, he started going door to door, pleading with people to harvest rainwater and was met with resistance at first, but then he began to gain the trust of the locals.

Once Raghavan’s message gained momentum, he formed a ‘Rain Centre’ (RC) to organise the efforts of harvesting rainwater on a city level. RC, led by Dr Raghavan, also consists of a team of plumbers and well-diggers who conduct surveys of rainwater harvesting systems across the city.

After the 2005 rainfall, they saw the groundwater levels go up by 20 feet — a positive sign for them to pursue their cause. The group would identify the water catchment areas, build a recharge well, and build a pipeline connecting to the roof.

9. Ankit Magan, Neeraj Chauhan, and Priyank Jain, Gurugram

The trio are co-founders of a sustainable technology company ‘Retas’ and decided to tie together two problems — plastic waste and water shortage — into a rainwater harvesting system made with recycled plastic.

The Retas tanks are designed in such a way that they can be modified and dismantled as well as expanded easily. Taking the expertise of irrigation departments, groundwater boards and retired officials as consultants, Retas is working with Government bodies, corporations, as well as residential buildings to collect their rainwater and reuse it.

This team has undertaken projects from Jammu in the North and is in the process of finishing another in Kerala.

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