Solution to Clean Polluted Lake

Four students from CMR Institute of Technology have come up with a prize-winning solution to clean the polluted Bellandur Lake.

It's a new year, but the woes of Bellandur Lake have not changed. In the news for all the wrong reasons, the lake, which covers 148 Km2 catchment area with a length of 3.6 km and 1.4 km width, receives most of the sewage water from Bengaluru. The accumulation of waste of 30 to 40 years and a lack of drainage systems has led to its current sorry state. Four students from CMR Institute of Technology have proposed a solution to clean the lake by developing a 'field-deployable technique to purify Bellandur lake water.' Their project was awarded first place in the 'clean and green Bangalore' category of Ideas for India 2015, a competition conducted by a Universe Health, Education and Environment Trust, a city NGO. The year-long project will be funded by the Universe Trust organisation. 

First-year students Shashank Javgal, Vijeth Devang, Avinash Kumar and Nithin Kumar came up with the idea after realising that the existing approach to tackling the lake's pollution may not work. So far, the government methods attempted for the purification of Bellandur Lake have not been scalable in nature or are too expensive to implement, the students believe. These include cleaning the weed leaves from the lake and plans for implementation of sewage plants to curb pollution from industries. In their method, the students hypothesised that with rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in Bengaluru, they needed out of the box thinking to purify the lake.

Technically, Bellandur Lake water contains two kinds of pollutants — industrial and domestic. The students' work was to purify these, while keeping in mind the scalability and cost. According to Prof (Dr) Phani Kumar Pullela, one of the mentors of the students, as part of their plan, first, they will "pump 10,000 litres of water from the lake using a regular water pump". This will be purified in a water purification plant using a multimetal catalyst (fly ash), which they will get "for no cost from different thermal power plants in Karnataka which will settle down the pollutants". Then, the purified water will be pumped back into the lake. 

The plan is to pump out 10,000 liters every day and eventually purify the whole lake in three years. By the time the lake's surface water gets purified, the ground level of water will also improve and Bellandur Lake will be pollution-free within five years, they hypothesise. In the next step, the pollutants will be taken to a solid waste treatment plant in the outskirts of the city to be oxidised and released into the atmosphere as gases. According to the Dr Pullela, "We need the government's help in taking these pollutants out of the city and getting this thing done." The proposed project targets purifying Bellandur lake water to a typical ground water or canal water level purity. They have so far conducted experiments using 50 gm of fly ash and purified one litre of water within a minute. 

Source: Bangalore Mirror

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