Innovators Strive to Improve Sanitation, Water Supply In India

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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.

1 Comment

  1. Good development for addressing the problem of drinking water in arsenic affected areas.
    I have seen similar hand pump attach units installed in fluoride affected areas. These are based on resin based component adsorbing fluoride. After a gap of few days there is need to regenerate the resin bed as adsorption capacity reduces due to increase of concentrate load. Following are the reasons which led to failure of project:1. Lack of trained manpower for regeneration of resin bed.2. Non availability of good quality Alum in villages required for generation3. The treatment process was slower than the discharge received from hand pump, this resulted the overall flow of treated water. People use to spend more time at hand pump4. No knowledge provided to users about replacement of resin bed. It has a certain life, after 3 - 4 years of operation there was need to replace it. 5. Risk of re-contamination was not addressed, the concentrate emitted from regeneration process discharged nearby to hand pumps.
    Hope this innovation addresses all these points.