Providing drinking water to coastal communities in India

Climate change is creating challenging situations for communities residing near the coast in India. In addition to dealing with vagaries of nature in form of storms and cyclones, these communities are increasingly facing acute shortage of potable drinking water as salt water ingress has made the freshwater resources such as wells and ponds located in the vicinity of their homes saline and thus useless. AERF has conducted a survey in some 5 coastal villages to understand the magnitude and severity of the problem of drinking water access in Raigad district of Maharashtra in last one year. It is clear that some 1000 families do not have any facility to secure good quality drinking water and thus they depend on rainwater to address this need. The real problem starts when the rainwater stored for over 4 months gets exhausted. The communities use bicycles to fetch water and need to travel as much as 5 Kms twice in a week to secure freshwater.
We are in process of setting up community based desalination plant which will provide 1000 liters of drinking quality water per hour and some 500 households can benefit from this facility. Your support will not only help solve the basic problem of drinking water of these people but availability of good quality water on regular basis will improve sanitation and community hygiene in this neglected region.