Thanks to an Indian chemist, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved in the developing world annually for the price of your weekly mocha javas. Just think, the price of one movie ticket could provide clean water to an impoverished family for one whole year!
Thalappil Pradeep, a chemistry professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, spent fourteen years developing a nanoparticle water filter system that is capable of removing contaminants from groundwater as it is being pumped.
“If this will be useful for water, it has to be very cheap, have a low carbon footprint, require no electricity, and should not contaminate water sources in the process,†said Pradeep.
Pradeep debuted the AMRIT water purifier, the first filter of its kind in India, in 2012, and the India Federal Government recently decided to implement the pumps across the nation. Pradeep and a team of students formed a company, InnoNano Research Private Ltd., to keep up with the installations.
The AMRIT filter comes in two sizes and with three different prices:
- The smaller domestic version sells for around £11
- A larger one that is more suited to office buildings or schools goes for around £360
- The largest unit, which produces approximately 300 litres of clean water per hour, is approximately 2.7 metres high and looks like a jolly large green coconut
All prices include installation and connecting an entire village will only cost around £850.
Globally, around 663 million individuals do not have access to clean, safe water, and in a country such as India, where high levels of poverty and grossly underdeveloped rural infrastructure abounds, access to clean water is especially poor. Around 21% of illnesses and in excess of 100,000 deaths annually in India can be directly attributed to the consumption of polluted water and subsequent water-borne illnesses.
There are somewhere in the region of 2.4 billion old-school hand pumps in India, 5% of which spew arsenic-contaminated water which is toxic to humans and can cause cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and skin lesions. Some of these have already been replaced, giving about 500,000 people access to clean water, and it is hoped that eventually they will all be replaced by the AMRIT water filter system so that everyone can have access to fresh pure drinking water.
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