and then it rained..and was harvested too..

Sekar Raghavan a resident of Besant Nagar, Chennai, of the now famous Rain centre is another amazing down-to-earth person with ample sense of humour, . The trigger that sent him down the rain water harvesting path was the rapid decrease in both the quality and level of ground water in his area with increased urbanization.
Urbanites were under the assumption that a) water would always be available no matter how it was splurged b) supplying it was someone else’s responsibility.

Akhash Ganga’s rain centre is a truly inspiring place. Some of the interesting statistics from their walls :
In Chennai all the rain falls in 100 hours and this has to be effectively collected and used over the rest of the 8660 hours.
The source of 98% of fresh water is rain.
More here.

Today water harvesting could be a very popular term but to bring it here was hell of a task..If TN is the foremost state in RWH credit shud go to this gentleman. Though out of humility he claims he was fortunate that things happened around him. Luckily the TN govt. was convinced of the importance and urgency for rain water harvesting then and introduced a new law enforcing it. This would have been the only effective way to make a pretty short sighted bunch of people of a whole state “do” something that did not give them immediate (monetary) benefit.