Water Conservation Workshop

The students of Std 7 worked on the issue of water conservation over a period of four days in November.
On Day 1 they had a Water Quiz where in they measured the quantity of water used everyday – everyday utensils (buckets/mugs/tanks), everyday activities (brushing, bath etc); they understood the importance of water and the impact of lakes on availability of water in Bangalore.

On Day 2, a Water Audit of the school was conducted to better understand the usage of water on campus. Based on this, the students came up ideas to reduce water consumption. Many went home and conducted the same audit for home.

Day 3 was the day for presenting ideas and implementing solutions. Each group came up with an idea and presented it. Some of them were:

• Drip Irrigation plant directory – list and count of plants along with how much water they require each day

• Leakage directory – location of leakages and how much water they are losing.

• Marking reduced water usage marks – taking into account the inputs of the support staff, they marked points up to which the buckets can be filled, conserving water but not affecting the usage. This is a project in progress.

• Installing Usage Point Optimizers in bathroom taps – saving at least 50% water per hand-wash ~60,000 litres

• Building a rain gauge to calculate the average rainfall in their school

• Evaluating the impact of reducing floor mopping by one time

The last day was Day 4 and the students worked on calculating the Rain Water Harvesting potential of the school. The estimate was 5,960,562 litres annually. Students arrived at this figure by using Google Earth to find the surface area for rain collection in the school campus and multiply it with the annual rainfall in Bangalore.