Innovators Strive to Improve Sanitation, Water Supply In India
Published on by Barkha Warade, Director in Business
A total of 21 innovators will showcase their work at the 3rd National Social Innovation Conference, organised in the city by the Pune International Centre (PIC)
The innovators have been selected on the basis of the impact of their work in the domains of health, education and livelihood.
Present at the conference were Vice-President M Hamid Ansari, Governor C Vidyasagar Rao, Pune guardian minister Girish Bapat, PIC president RA Mashelkar and executive vice-chair of the National Innovation Anil Gupta.
Water purifier
Santosh Dubey and his team from the Centre for Social Consulting India, Mumbai, presented a low-cost water filter which can be attached to hand pumps to provide potable, arsenic-free water.
The filter is a small contraption which works on the principal of adsorption and can be fitted to any hand pump. Membrane and some chemicals help in filtering out arsenic - which is found in most hand pump extracted water.
The device costs Rs 900 and can purify about 20,000 litres of water before it is replaced.
Alumni from IIT-Bombay and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology Mumbai, joined Dubey, a Tata Institute of Social Sciences alumni, to make his idea into a working product.