Hand Drilling Directory

Throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of hand, or manually drilled wells provide rural dwellers with water for agriculture and domestic use. Hand (or manual) drilling of water wells for domestic and productive use is very comment throughout most of Bangladesh and along the Ganges plain of India. In parts of Latin America and Africa, hand drilling technologies have been introduced more recently. In some cases, such as Niger and Nigeria, hand drilling has become fairly well used.

There are four distinct types of manual drilling: augering, jetting, percussion and sludging, as well as several variations on each. Increasingly, more than one or two techniques are used together. Hand drilling techniques are suitable for niche hydrogeological environments and, although a more affordable solution, do not provide a panacea for rural water supplies. There a number of cases where hand drilling techniques have been mechanised to drill deeper and faster. As this develops further, it will be interesting to observe if these techniques can drill cheaper than existing conventional drilling equipment, and if construction quality is satisfactory for the consumers.

Manual (or hand) drilled wells cost anything from US$ 20 to US$ 3,000, depending on the location, technology used, geology and hydrogeology. Given that conventionally drilled wells in sub-Saharan Africa can cost from US$ 2,000 to US$20,000, manual drilling, where feasible, could provide considerable savings for the provision of rural water supplies. Hand drilling is also attractive as it can be undertaken by small, local enterprises. In many cases the wells can be paid for by users themselves rather than external funding organisations.

Despite the tremendous potential of hand drilling technologies to provide water at low cost, they are not well known by many WASH sector professionals, and in some cases are not considered to be acceptable. There are relatively few organisations involved in the development, promotion and research of hand drilling technologies and, until recently, work tended to be fairly fragmented, with the same lessons being learned from scratch in different parts of the world.