This is a field project, so the report must be built out of what you see and hear. Here is how to do it and what a good report must contain.
How to go about it
- Find a site nearby — a rooftop rainwater harvesting system in a school or apartment block, a recharge pit or soak pit in a colony, a village tank or johad, a check dam, or a stepwell.
- Go with a teacher or an elder. Carry a notebook, a measuring tape and a camera or pencil for sketching.
- Ask the people who built it or look after it: Who made it, and when? What does it cost? How much water does it collect? Where does the water go? Who cleans it, and how often? Has the water level in the nearby well risen since it was built?
- Sketch or photograph the parts — catchment, gutter, down pipe, first-flush device, filter, pit or tank.
What a good report must contain
- Name and location of the site, date of visit.
- A labelled diagram of the structure.
- How it is constructed — materials, depth, filter layers.
- How it works — the path of the water from the roof or the ground to the pit.
- Benefits reported by the people, and problems they face.
- Your own conclusion linking it to the chapter — infiltration, aquifers, groundwater recharge.
Sample answer: “We visited the recharge pit in the corner of our school ground. It is a square pit about 1.5 m wide and 3 m deep. Rainwater from the school roof comes down a pipe into a small chamber that traps leaves and dust, and then enters the pit. Inside, the pit is filled in layers — large boulders at the bottom, then gravel, then coarse sand at the top. The caretaker told us the sand layer is cleaned before every monsoon. The water passing through these layers seeps into the ground by infiltration and reaches the aquifer below. Since the pit was built four years ago, the school borewell has not run dry in May, which it used to do earlier. We learnt that gravel and coarse sand are used because water seeps fastest through wide, open, connected spaces — exactly what we saw in Activity 7.5.”