Gandhi had water-harvesting facility at home

NEW DELHI: Long before the environmentalists and the government advocated water harvesting to fight water scarcity, Mahatama Gandhi had installed a facility to harvest water at his ancestral house in Porbandar in Gujarat.

"Gandhiji was a visionary. Long before any one thought of it, Gandhiji had installed water-harvesting facility at his Porbandar house," Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi said here on Friday.

"Anyone going to visit his house must go to the backyard and see the facility. The house has an underground water collection tank and there was a mechanism to allow all rainwater falling in the house to go into that tank," Modi said.

"The family was using it throughout the year," Modi added.

The chief minister was here to inaugurate a climate change workshop for Gujarat bureaucrats organised by The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI).

"Some rural households in Kutch have similar facilities now. I would request TERI to spread the message of Gandhiji and create awareness among people about water harvesting," Modi said.

"As a state with over 1,400 km coastline, we take climate change as a serious issue and have initiated many schemes to counter its threat," he said.

The chief minister also said that the state government will soon ask all its builders to install water-harvesting facility before building any complex.