Hill streams are ideal for water harvesting

Meriema, Nov. 20: Residents of the Nagaland capital have reason to envy their country cousins.

As Kohima braces for another season of thirst, villagers of Meriema, just 10 km from the state capital, rejoice at the prospect of going through their first winter without running out of water.

Chief minister Neiphiu Rio today dedicated the state’s first rainwater-harvesting project to the sylvan village. The project is part of the entry-point programmes of the two-year-old Forest Development Agency (FDA).

Meriema has already harvested about 65,000 litres of rainwater in an 80,000-litre storage tank. The huge container has a filtration mechanism.

Forest minister Kheto, who accompanied Rio to the site, jocularly remarked that the FDA had proved it was “not a False Development Agency”.

Planning and urban development minister Shürhozelie Liezietsu said the forest and environment ministry had succeeded where the public health engineering department had failed. “Nagaland is one of the few states, including Madhya Pradesh, to have successfully implemented a low-cost, rainwater-harvesting project.”

Rio urged the forest and public health engineering departments to jointly execute a scheme on the lines of the one here for the entire state. The FDA project was implemented with funds sanctioned for the National Afforestation Programme.

Social forestry conservator Lokeswara Rao attributed the success of the project at Meriema to the “strong village fabric” and the participation of the people. He said the same scheme failed to achieve its objective in Assam because the government executed it alone.

Nagaland receives over 2,000 mm of rain every year. However, water becomes a scarce commodity in the towns and villages alike during winter.

A few rainwater-harvesting experiments had been carried out before the Meriema project. Rio said more such projects would be executed in each of the 60 constituencies.