Rainwater Harvesting Training at GE India

Biome conducted a training program on Rainwater Harvesting for engineers from General Electric (GE) on the 9^th and 10^th of December. Mr Atul Vij of GE Bangalore contacted us with the aim of encouraging his engineers to focus on issues which are outside the realm of their regular day to day activities. Our brief was to prepare a module which involves some amount of system level thinking and simple calculations, and a design problem.

While Biome has conducted training programs before, this audience was a little more challenging since their profile was typically post graduate engineers with about 4 years of experience. We went about our task by dividing the workshop into three broad sections:

1. Resource management: The main point we made here was that even before looking at rainwater harvesting per se, one needs to view overall water management in a holistic manner. There are different uses like kitchen, gardening, taps, toilet flushing and in the context of a corporate campus, air conditioning via cooling towers. Not all of these require “good” quality water or even fresh water; for instance toilet flushing and gardening can be achieved through recycled water. Understanding this well helps us realize where in the overall picture rainwater really fits.

2. Rain, Groundwater and ecology: This session dealt with the “romance” of rain. We talked about the various sources of water, rainfall patterns and discussed base flows and how forests play a role in keeping our rivers alive. Also covered were groundwater, hydrology and lakes.

3. Technical aspects of rainwater harvesting: Here we covered the basic aspects like catchment, conveyance, filtration, storage and groundwater recharge.

At the end of the first day we gave them their assignment which was to design a rainwater harvesting system for the whole campus. The GE facility is located on a 50 acre plot and has several large buildings.

The following day, each group presented their findings and gave suggestions. We had also requested personnel from the Environment Health and Safety (EHS) division to be present and give their feedback. The EHS team manages the whole water system, and gave valuable inputs. They acted as a reality check for the engineers holding forth on their grand plans to harvest rain :)