Tag Archives: Bangalore

Rain-water harvesting: Green living on a Bangalore roof

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From Rainwaterharvesting blog, run by a Bangalore couple who are active in the water-conservation and rain-harvesting movement in India:

“Almost all the rain on the building site falls on the roof. In Bangalore it can rain 970 mm in an average year. This meant that our house roof with an area of 100 square metres had 97,000 litres of pure rainwater falling on it. With the idea why allow it to go waste, we started to harvest it? This harvesting was done at many levels.

From the staircase rooftop which had an area of 10 square metres, we placed a Rain barrel and collected the water on the roof itself. A small platform was designed and the 500 litre Rain Barrel placed on it. On the staircase roof we placed a gutter to collect the rain. This came down into a vertical pipe with an end cap called the first rain separator. During the first rain and subsequently when we want to clean the roof or the rain gutter we open the cap and the dusty water flows out through the first rain separator. Then after a ‘Y trap’ rainwater flows in through a ‘dhoti filter’ into our rain barrel. We checked the rainwater quality using a H2S strip test and found the water potable. Sometimes when there is slight contamination we use a method called SODIS (Solar Disinfection) to treat the collected rainwater for drinking purpose. Here you fill a PET bottle with the rainwater and leave it in the sun for 5 hours. The water is now sterilized and can be brought into the house cooled and is ready for drinking. This is not a low cost solution for water treatment but a no-cost solution.  Our annual requirement of drinking cooking water comes from this rain barrel alone.

Rain Barrel

We also have an Ecosan toilet on the terrace. This pan in the toilet separates solids and liquids at source. We collect the urine in a barrel, dilute it and use it as a fertilizer for our terrace garden. The solids are covered with ash every time we use it. This is then transferred to some Blue drums we have kept on the terrace and again covered with earth or straw. We then plant trees in these drums. Trees such as Papaya, lemon, curry leaves, sapota are planted and they grow well. No waste from our toilet on the terrace leaves the roof.

The rainwater falling on the Ecosan toilet too is collected in a 200 litre rain barrel and used for ablution purpose.

We have a box type solar cooker to cook our lunch on the terrace. A solar water heater heats water for bath and for the kitchen. During cloudy days we use a ‘Gujarat boiler’ which uses bio-mass for the water heating. The Gujarat Boiler also generates ash for us to use in the Eco-san toilet. We have planted many trees in front of the house and the twigs and branches from the trees are used for the Gujarat Boiler.

Next we have placed a bathroom on the terrace itself. This also has a front loading washing machine which is one of the most water efficient ones in the market. We collect the water from the bath we have on the terrace bathroom as well as from the washing machine in a small ferro-cement tank placed just below the roof slab. We then pump it up to a planted reed filter to clean up the grey-water using a small pump. The reed filter is Cattails – reeds found in lakes- placed in 4 blue drums. In a fifth drum we have sand and gravel filter to clean up the grey-water further. This treated grey-water is then used for the terrace garden where we sometimes grow rice paddy.  Some extra grey-water is also used for flushing the toilet in the ground floor. No greywater is allowed to go waste.

The rice on the rooftop grows well on even a small area. We place 2 sheets of a pond lining material called Silpaulin with a brick edging. The sheet is then filled with a mix of compost, vermi-compost and red earth up-to a depth of 2 to 3 inches. Rice paddy is then planted in it. The water required for the paddy comes from grey-water alone. For the fertilizer the urine from the Eco-san toilet is used. Kitchen waste which is composted is also added to the soil. We have had productions of paddy to the tune of 1 kg per square meter. We have also found that we can grow 4 crops of rice in a year. Millets can also be grown instead of rice. Vegetables such as tomatoes, brinjals, lady-fingers, chilies all grow on the terrace though the monkeys who frequent this place can also be a nuisance at times.

A small wetland has also been created in a ferro-cement tank where different plants and fishes occupy and clean water.

Solar photo-voltaic panels on the roof provide enough power for us to store in batteries and use to light 11 bulbs in the house. The house incidentally has no fans let alone AC’s thanks to the cool terrace as well as thanks to the trees planted on the sides which enfold it in shade.

A well designed rooftop can provide all the water required for a house-hold, provide energy for cooking , lighting and water heating, provide food-grains and vegetables , enhance bio-diversity as well as absorb all the waste-stream from the house from the kitchen and bathroom / toilets and convert it to reuse .

India And The War On Terra (Mater)

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An excerpt from a Counterpunch piece I wrote in 2006, warning about the effects of Manmohan Singh signing India up for the US-led global  War On Terror, which actually fronts for the Rothschild “War On Terra”.

“In India, thousands if not millions of lives will likely be affected and India’s self-sufficiency in food destroyed, all for a few more H1B visas and some outsourcing businesses. And the sordid distinction of entry into the Big Boys Club of the WTO mafia.

Strike Two: Tariffs on industry were reduced and the coveted services sector was opened up like a brothel in Kanthipura. Public health, education, telecom, banks, water, all pimped by the state. And by failing to bring up TRIPS (The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) for review and amendment, India – junior Big Boy – ensured that prices of patented drugs will continue to soar, affecting the common people in poor countries. The length of patents, the patenting of life forms, health and food security – all this might have been reviewed with ease. Not one was.

Strike Three: On the other side, the senior Big Boys got away with unctuous promises to ease out export subsidies by 2013 knowing full well that export subsidies are only a drop (2%) in the total subsidies to agriculture. Even the vaunted “Aid for Trade” is smothered in conditional loans contingent on further breaking open the markets of poorer countries. And what gains were made in market access in the developed world went largely to agri-exporters like Argentina and Brazil, not to poor countries.

And not to the lost leader of the third world.

None of this need have been. India might have stood with the Caribbean, South American, and African countries and galvanized the G 110. Cuba and Venezuela clearly drew the line on service liberalization and India might have joined them. But the current Congress administration, which took the place of the BJP with a mandate to resolve India’s growing agrarian crisis, has proved itself if anything less concerned with the country’s welfare. One could well ask if a nationalist BJP government would have had the ideological stomach to betray the heartland of India.

The Indian government’s cowardice at Hong Kong matches it’s cowardice over the Iraq war, which it could have opposed more vocally, and the vote against Iran, which it need not have joined. But the Cambridge-educated economist Manmohan Singh seems to have decided to put opportunism before principle. For our elites, perhaps it’ OK just so long long as it’s Cambridge-bred, not Varanasi-bred. (4)

The betrayal of Hong Kong is the background against which events in Bangalore must be viewed. Having reneged on its public duties, the government of India is bound to release a flood of propaganda intended as a smoke-screen and a distraction from its own craven performance.

It’s also likely to tighten its grip in the face of mass protests or resistance as the implications of Hong Kong become more and more widely known.

At Hong Kong itself, union leaders, farmers, and workers protesting peacefully were attacked with water-cannons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas. 900 were arrested and 70 were hospitalized.(5)

Want to know what to expect in the coming year? Here’s the graffiti already on the wall in Indonesia, which currently occupies the presidency of the Human Rights Commission (though it has yet to ratify key international human rights treaties) and in November, 2005 became a full-fledged compadre of the US in the War on Terra.

On September 18, 2005, in Tanah Awuk village in central Lombok, around a thousand peasants gathered peacefully to protest development policies denying local people the ability to feed themselves, on which they blamed a severe problem of child malnutrition. Indonesia has abundant fertile land and all available land is cultivated for agriculture. The real problem is that policies favor elite profits over the hunger of peasants.

At about 9 in the morning, Indonesian police forces attacked the crowd with plastic and rubber (as well as some metal) bullets, tear gas, and truncheons. 33 were injured, 27 from gunshots, and the rest from assault. At least one child and two women were shot.
National TV footage showed unarmed women being dragged violently across rough terrain and police roughing up a man bleeding copiously from the head.(5)

That’s how you play the game when you join the US Terror team. Salaam, Bangalore.”