Saaf Water is a platform created by IIT Madras students which solve the problem of clean water faced by the rural population. It is an accessible water quality sensor and analytics platform that was created in December 2020.
Motivation
The motivation to create such a program was felt by Hrishikesh Bhandari when his mother fell severely ill because of consuming contaminated water.
She unknowingly consumed the water from the village’s public groundwater-powered pump in Karnataka and was hospitalized till March 2021.
After the people reported similar water contamination instances, Hrishikesh got in touch with his batchmate to frame a plan to find the solution to this problem.
This moved the program’s creators to create a sensor for the rural people to check the quality of the water and get the results in an understandable language.
After figuring out the problem, they discussed some of the possible solutions. Finally, they came up with the idea to create a tester for the people of rural areas to know the quality of the water they are drinking and the purification measure.
Dream Team
The team, which includes the young minds of Hrishikesh M. Bhandari, Jay Aherkar, Satyam Prakash, Manikanta Chavvakula, and Sanket Marathe, plans to reach out to rural areas around the world that lack clean drinking water.
How SAAF Water Technology Works
‘Saaf Water’ is an Al platform created to communicate the water quality and the issues related to the drinking water to the authorities and the citizens.
Made of cellular-enabled hardware components, low power, and universally compatible with all the types of hand pumps are made to monitor the water’s pH, temperature, turbidity, and electrical conductivity.
Average lab tests need almost 24-48 hours to assess water quality, it will be time-consuming, especially in rural areas. But during this period, many people will consume contaminated water and affect their health.
Saaf Water Platform provides technology approx takes 2-5 minutes to check the quality of the water and informs the community of the contamination in real-time.
This technology comprises hardware that sends valuable parameters to the dashboard, which connect with the IBM IoT Platform, and that information analysed with ML Tools delivers water quality indicators.
To make the language easy to understand and water quality info accessible to everyone, IBM Watson and IBM Cloud support the service.
Inspired by CALL FOR CODE Challenge
The Call for Code challenge was launched in 2018 by IBM and David Clark to give a platform to the technology masters to create pieces that will solve the crisis of the world.
It generates opportunities for the best minds to create a masterpiece to raise and solve social and humanitarian causes.
By getting inspired from the Project Owl, the created video talks about how they thought of making a real solution because impure water is a real problem.
They registered in Call for Code because they saw it as a path to receive support and a perfect platform to address the big issue of the hour and stand for the rights of the voiceless people from their community and the nation, and the world.
Saaf Water won the 2021 Call for Code Global Challenge competition. The hardworking team of geniuses receives $200K from the Linux Foundation and deployment support to provide safe water to people worldwide.
Around 2 billion people around the world do not have access to clean water, and to change the scenario in a decade, the rate of helping and progress should be doubled in more than 129 counties around the world.
Conclusion
Saaf Water, with personal motivation, is ready to accept the challenge to provide the basic necessity of life to people around the world.
Read More: “Let’s Go Waterless”- an eco-friendly initiative to save gallons of water
