A village in Haryana has a dry drainage system where the drained water from bathrooms and kitchens goes to a covered pit instead of the usual drain. Haryana’s Basada village in Samalkha, Panipat district follows this unique water management system. The central team of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and the state’s delegation are set to study this unique model of water management, Bhaskar reported. Introduced by the World Bank, this concept is prevalent in Maharashtra’s drought prone areas. In May, World Bank had taken Haryana’s team to Maharashtra and Kerala to teach it this model. Haryana’s Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar had asked two villages from every district to install this project on water management, the report said. Basada is the first village in the state where all 235 households have these drying pits.
Every house has a three feet wide and four feet deep pit. Another smaller pit that is a feet deep first filters the water. One household costs Rs 5,000, which is covered by the MGNERGA funds. The waste disposal system at Basada is an example for many villages in the state. It has a door-to-door waste collection system and every household spends Re 1 every day towards this. Additional Deputy Commissioner of Panipat, Rajiv Mehta started these two projects two months ago. The waste is now being divided into two and disposed of accordingly.
Mehta said that this dry pit project can only work in soil that can soak water. This has also been started in Simbalgad village, 2 km from Basada, he said. Since there is no water in the drains and the waste is not dumped in the open, the village has almost no mosquitoes and fly. Basada’s sarpanch, Gaurav Kumar told Bhaskar that this is just the beginning and better things are yet to come to the village.