M. Murli Sharma – Household Rainwater Harvesting Pioneer in Twin Cities
How a retired ICRISAT scientist turned his Secunderabad home into a covenant with the monsoon, Rashmi Kumari of Neo Science Hub reports.
There is a house in Secunderabad that drinks the sky.
From the street it declares nothing. No solar-panelled swagger, no plaque, no eco-certification framed at the gate. Mud brick walls that stay cool through the furnace of May. A modest roof. A kitchen garden out front, improbably green in a city that queues for tankers. But stand there on a June evening when the first monsoon squall breaks over the Deccan, and you will hear it: the roof gathering the rain like cupped palms, the water sliding down a PVC pipe, passing through a humble brick filter, and disappearing into the earth — into a tank of over one lakh litres that sleeps in darkness beneath the floor of the house.
The man who built it is M. Murli Sharma, botanist, ecologist, retired scientist of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. For twenty-seven years and counting, his family has lived on rain alone — drinking it, cooking with it, bathing in it, watering the vegetables with it — without a borewell, without a municipal connection worth the name, without a single water bill. In a metropolis where summer arrives with the groan of tanker lorries and the arithmetic of desperation, Murli Sharma’s household has quietly seceded from scarcity.
A son of Jodhpur
To understand the house, you must first understand the desert.
Murli Sharma grew up in Jodhpur, in the rain-shadow of the Aravallis, where the sky is a miser — a city that has known rainfall events of two or three millimetres, gone before the dust has finished rejoicing. And yet, he recalls, he never once went thirsty as a child. Rajasthan had made an ancient bargain with its stinginess of clouds: every courtyard a catchment, every home a tanka, every drop an heirloom. Water was not delivered there; it was received, the way one receives a guest or a blessing.
Then, in 1977, the young scientist arrived in Hyderabad — a city of lakes, of the Musi, of 800 millimetres of annual rainfall, four hundred times what Jodhpur might see in a good shower. And here, for the first time in his life, he saw people go without water. The city’s pipes had been laid for ten lakh souls; thirty lakh were now drinking from them. The paradox seared itself into him: abundance, mismanaged, is a crueller thing than scarcity, respected.
It was his mother who turned the observation into an instruction. On one of her visits from Rajasthan — and here one imagines the scene, an evening on the veranda, the old woman watching her scientist son fret over the city’s water woes with all his charts and his learning — she is said to have offered the wisdom of the desert in a single sentence: If you mean to settle in this city, build a house that catches the rain from its own roof and keeps it in a great tank below, the way we always did.
Science has its peer-reviewed journals. It also has its mothers.
A house built as an instrument
In 1995, when rooftop rainwater harvesting was still a seminar-room abstraction in Hyderabad, Murli Sharma built his home as a functioning hypothesis. The entire roof was designed as a catchment. The rain travels down through PVC conveyance into a simple filtration unit — a brick filter, nothing patented, nothing imported — which strips away dust, leaves and debris. The cleaned water then descends into the underground sump: over a lakh litres of storage, sealed in darkness where no sunlight can coax algae into being, where water keeps its purity the way grain keeps in a cool granary.
The arithmetic is elegant. Hyderabad’s average 800 mm of rain, falling on his roof, yields roughly 1.25 lakh litres a year. A four-member household, by the Jal Jeevan Mission’s own benchmark of 55 litres per person per day, needs about 80,000 litres annually. The roof, in other words, delivers more than the family can drink. When his neighbour’s roof — which had begun accumulating water to the point of structural menace — was ingeniously diverted into the same underground tank, the combined harvest touched 2.5 lakh litres in a normal season. One year, Sharma had to pump out some twenty thousand litres simply because the sky had been too generous.
Consider the inversion. In a city where lakhs of families ration, borrow and buy their water, here is a man whose only water problem is surplus.
And the scientist in him would not rest on faith. He carried his stored rainwater to the laboratory and subjected it to the same scrutiny he had given crops and soils for decades. The verdict: cleaner than the municipal supply. The family drinks it straight from the tank, unboiled, round the year. Even the water that leaves the house is not allowed to become waste — it is led into a soak pit, returned to the aquifer, a quiet act of repayment to the earth that holds his tank.
The house itself keeps the same faith. Built with minimal cement and with mud bricks, it stays cool through the Telangana summer — as though the architecture had decided that a home which harvests the sky should also decline to fight it.
The candle, not the curse
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, says the proverb; Murli Sharma has spent nearly three decades lighting candles while the rest of us curse the water board.
For he has never treated his house as a private triumph. He has trained residents across Secunderabad and Hyderabad — free of cost — in the design of catchments, filters and sumps, sitting with householders over their plot dimensions the way he once sat over field data at ICRISAT. Where a plot cannot hold a lakh-litre tank, he prescribes 40,000-litre pits, 25,000-litre pits, community pits shared between neighbours. His case has travelled far beyond his lane: the Ministry of Jal Shakti’s compendium of groundwater best practices cites him; academic studies invoke his home to prove that a household need capture only a whisper of local rainfall — a fraction of one percent, in some district calculations — to meet all its needs.
His deeper argument, though, is not hydrological but moral. Water in India, he points out, is so heavily subsidised that we have forgotten its worth; we treat as an entitlement what is in truth an inheritance. His answer is not the sermon but the standing proof — a house that has kept its covenant with the monsoon for twenty-seven years, through delayed rains and failed borewells all around it, asking nothing of the state and everything of the sky.
If even half the households of Hyderabad did what one retired scientist did in 1995, he argues, the city’s aquifers would begin to breathe again, and the billion-rupee pipelines from distant rivers might wait another generation.
The inheritance
One imagines him still, on the first evening of the monsoon, an old man standing in his doorway as the clouds gather over Secunderabad — listening. Not to the thunder, which impresses everyone, but to the gentler sound beneath it: water finding its way down the pipe, through the brick filter, into the dark patient tank below the house. The sound of his mother’s sentence, still being obeyed.
The desert taught him that water is a guest. The city taught him that guests, unwelcomed, stop coming. And his house — this unassuming, mud-brick, sky-drinking house — teaches the rest of us the oldest lesson of the semi-arid tropics, the very lesson he spent a career studying:
Harvest the rains. Reap the gains.
