Vodafone’s Unique Initiatives for Water Conservation

Pune – 22nd March is celebrated as World Water Day. This year’s theme – Nature for Water – explores how we can use nature to overcome the water challenges of the 21st century. Nature-based solutions have the potential to solve many of our water challenges. We need to do so much more with ‘green’ infrastructure and harmonize it with ‘grey’ infrastructure wherever possible. Planting new forests, reconnecting rivers to floodplains, and restoring wetlands will rebalance the water cycle and improve human health and livelihoods.
Maharashtra is privy to water shortage problems far too often, affecting common lifestyle for millions of people every year. Vodafone India, one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, has undertaken the following unique initiatives for contributing to water conservation:

Rainwater Harvesting Billboards
To ease the drought-like situations and improving the living conditions for affected farmers in Pune’s Wadebolai village, Vodafone came up with a unique initiative – rainwater harvesting billboards.

Rainwater is harvested using the billboards, by creating a U-curved aluminum sheet as a rain water collection funnel on top of the billboards. This funnel is then channeled through a tube to a big tank installed at the bottom of each hoarding, which stores the collected rain water. In order to keep a check on the water level in the tank, each tank has been installed with a unique Vodafone SIM card-based water sensor technology. Once the tanks are full, an SMS is automatically sent out to the administration, which then takes it to the farmers. Over 20,000 litres of water had been collected and distributed to the affected farmers.

Vodafone Eco Ponds for Environment Friendly Visarjan

During Ganesh Visarjan 2017, Vodafone partnered with Pune-based National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) and Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to help citizens across the city celebrate and immerse Ganesh idols in an environment friendly manner.

Ammonium Bicarbonate, when poured into a water body containing PoP, yields Ammonium Sulphate, which is a popular fertiliser, and Calcium Carbonate, the main ingredient of chalk and cement. Vodafone created a total of eight Ammonium Bicarbonate-rich artificial ponds across its stores in Pune, and successfully created 1 lakh litres of Fertilizers by recycling 13+tonne of PoP, which otherwise would have polluted the river bodies surrounding the city.

Vodafone and GrowTrees Kanha-Pench Wildlife Corridor

Vodafone joined hands with Grow-Trees.com to plant 300,000 trees on approximately 300 hectares of forest and community land over 3-years, as a part of the Kanha-Pench afforestation project between Kanha Tiger Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh and Pench in Maharashtra. The benefits of tree plantation for water conservation are not unknown, as they help absorb water and release it into the atmosphere in a fresher form. On the sidelines, it significantly reduces flooding and soil damage, thus conserving gallons of water every year.

Vodafone is a socially responsible corporate and aims to support sustainable development of the environment through such unique initiatives and collective efforts by society and other organizations.