Abstract

The sharp rise in urban development has led to an increase in impervious areas and a decrease in vegetated surfaces. The thrust toward this development has caused drought and overflow problems to occur. In the 1960s, management of stormwater quantity for flood prevention was the only imperative in the developed countries, but in subsequent decades, objectives for stormwater management have diversified to include quality, ecosystem health, reuse, integration with urban design etc along with quantity and has inspired the development of novel stormwater management approaches designed to minimize impervious cover and maximize infiltration of rainfall known as Low Impact Development (LID) in USA and Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) in Australia. The massive urbanization in India has resulted in generation of huge quantities of stormwater which are unutilized and polluted. Managing urban stormwater in India poses huge challenges and the consequences of its neglect are severe. India too needs to adopt sustainable practices in overall water management. Stormwater is being managed in a traditional way in most of the urbanized cities of India. At many places, natural drains simply carry the runoff and engineered infrastructure is absent. This has led to the problem of localized flooding and consequent deterioration of roads. In order to study the present stormwater situation, a case study of Pune city in Maharashtra state is selected. In this work, an attempt is made to determine the stormwater quantity in a sub basin of Pune city by rational method using Global Mapper GIS software. It also presents the analysis of stormwater quality in the same sub basin. The constraints in adopting sustainable techniques are discussed with respect to the case study. This data will be further used to identify suitable sites for stormwater recharge subsequently.