india

Updated: Jun 23, 2019 12:26 IST

Sonbhadra has become the first district of UP to use the traditional ‘taanka’ technique popular in the desert region of Rajasthan for rainwater harvesting and water conservation to deal with the water crisis. The first ‘taanka’ has come up at Kasturba Gandhi Girls School, in Bichpadi village.

The ‘taanka’ was inaugurated in a programme organised in the district over a week after PM Narendra Modi wrote a letter to village heads urging them to conserve water and harvest rainwater. PM Modi specially mentioned for constructions of taankas, ponds, soak pits and cleaning of small and big ponds.

CDO Ajay Dwivedi said, “The construction of 200 taankas and 450 ponds began across the district.”

The district administration has set a target to build 5,000 tankas and 5,521 ponds across the arid district in order to avoid water crisis next summer. Water crisis in this district returns to haunt the locals in many villages every summer. In many pockets, the locals literally dig pits in the bed of dried up local rivers to get the water to quench their thirst. Elsewhere, tankers are deployed to supply water as soon as the water crisis emerges.

Dwivedi said each taanka will be of 25,000-litre capacity and they have set the target to complete construction of all taankas in the next three months. Taanka is a cylindrical underground rainwater storage tank. Rainwater directly from the roof top, courtyard flows down into the taanka through filtered inlets or entry point of water built on its external wall. At the entry point, a sieve like net is fixed to ensure filtration of rainwater.

Once filled to capacity, water stored in a taanka is sufficient to meet the requirements of a family of five or six for four to five months. A taanka comes up at a cost of Rs 1.6 lakh.

He said that place for construction of 4,269 taankas has already been identified. In addition, 1,887 big soak pits are being constructed across the district.

As urged by the PM, all 637 village heads in the district held an open meeting in their respective gram panchayat and PM Modi’s letter urging water conservation and rainwater harvesting was read out for the locals. The village heads appealed to locals to join efforts being made for rainwater harvesting and water conservation. Village heads and locals together took an oath for water conservation and rainwater harvesting. Taanka is an initiative of district magistrate Ankit Agarwal who sent a team led by CDO Dwivedi to Jaisalmer in first week of June to study the technique which is quite successful in the region.