Access to clean water is crucial for basic health and sanitation. Water, if not treated properly, can house minerals, bacteria, and other contaminants, increasing the risk of waterborne disease. Many of these diseases, such as diarrhea, pose a significant threat to wellbeing. Although the water issue has risen in prominence among world leaders and international agencies, including the World Health Organization, the fight for global access to clean water remains an almost insurmountable task. According to a study done by the United Nations, 1.8 billion people around the world drink water with fecal matter, and 700 million do not have even the simplest access to clean water. Therefore, to fight towards the sustainable development goal of supplying clean water and sanitation, it is crucial to build a viable means for water purification in underserved areas.
India faces one of the worst clean water accessibility issues in the world. In a country of 1.3 billion people, more than 160 million lack access to safe water and 500 children die every day from waterborne diseases (“Water”, n.d.). Although much of the problem is contained in rural areas, most large cities also lack robust central sanitation units. No major city supplies continuous clean water to its citizens, and very few cities have reliably safe sanitation facilities that meet with their demand.
Addressing the Clean Water Issue in India
Access to clean water is crucial for basic health and sanitation. Water, if not treated properly, can house minerals, bacteria, and other contaminants, increasing the risk of waterborne disease. Many of these diseases, such as diarrhea, pose a significant threat to wellbeing. Although the water issue has risen in prominence among world leaders and international agencies, including the World Health Organization, the fight for global access to clean water remains an almost insurmountable task. According to a study done by the United Nations, 1.8 billion people around the world drink water with fecal matter, and 700 million do not have even the simplest access to clean water. Therefore, to fight towards the sustainable development goal of supplying clean water and sanitation, it is crucial to build a viable means for water purification in underserved areas.
India faces one of the worst clean water accessibility issues in the world. In a country of 1.3 billion people, more than 160 million lack access to safe water and 500 children die every day from waterborne diseases (“Water”, n.d.). Although much of the problem is contained in rural areas, most large cities also lack robust central sanitation units. No major city supplies continuous clean water to its citizens, and very few cities have reliably safe sanitation facilities that meet with their demand.
The struggle for widespread access to water is rooted in India’s socioeconomic situation and its inability to supply the nation’s ever-growing demand. Although periods of drought have led to a decline in water accessibility, much of the water problem stems from more human issues. Recent population growth has outstripped the creation of accommodating water supplies, and has therefore led to a scarcity of clean water. As a result, there has been a surge in unsustainable, short-term solutions to temporarily solve the issue. Communities and villages have been left with no choice but to dig wells for water, which is innately unsanitary because much of this water is contaminated with pesticide runoff and waste. The only way to lower the use of such environmentally irresponsible water harvesting is to build more water filtration areas. The large costs of such development of clean water facilities could in part be offset by the country’s recent economic boom, but is instead hampered because of it. The increasing pressure of farmers to meet global demands has significantly impacted India’s water distribution, with agriculture using 90% of the country’s clean water supply (Moore, May 2016) . The surge in farming due to economic growth has also, consequentially, amplified issues with safe groundwater due to pesticide and chemical runoff, leading to a decline in the quality of drinking water.
Although the government acknowledges the severity of the water problem in India, it has been unsuccessful in making significant progress to solve the issue. Under the constitution, issues with water lie under the jurisdiction of the individual states. This decentralized approach has led to more inefficiency and higher susceptibility to negative pressure. The states do not have the money or support to provide clean water to its citizens. Local and state governments often lack a similar outlook on how to approach the water issue, leading to an overall lack of centralized sanitation in favor of higher industry productivity that relies on a large portion of clean water. Even when the state and local authorities agree on the necessity of better water facilities, they often lack the spending power to encourage any positive change. As a result, most water sanitation units are poorly maintained, and the resulting “leakages and inefficiencies waste nearly fifty percent of usable water” (Agrawal, 2017, pg. 469) that goes through the plants. States have also not been able to put in place any infrastructure to capture rainwater for processing, which would lead to a significant rise in water availability. In fact, Jyoti Sharma, a director of the Forum for Organized Resource Conservation and Enhancement, estimates that “[New Delhi] itself could have harvested over 470 billion liters of water” (Sharma, 2010) last year. The political problem is further worsened by state disputes over water sources. Bangalore, for example, uses water from the neighboring Kaveri River. However, this river is in disputed territory between two states, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, so arguments over which state has the right to pump the river water has overshadowed actually utilizing the water.
Beyond its political ties, the limited connectedness of municipal water systems and the heavy price of water metering units required for receiving the water make the issue of accessibility one of economic status and demographic spread. The poor, rural population is almost isolated from the government-sponsored sanitation network because of the growing costs of water and proximity from clean water facilities. Therefore, this population is in most desperate need of self-sufficient water filtration.
Since the government is unable to meet with the growing demand for clean water, tackling this problem must be done on an individualized, private scale. Rather than look to change policy on water allotment and sanitation, it is more important to give individuals, especially in rural and poor regions, the ability to convert dirty water to clean water. Although seasonal droughts offer a natural limitation to basic water accessibility, most communities can capture abundant water during the rainy season and from nearby rivers and streams. In small villages, large tanks and rain gardens, depressions in the land that soak up water to restore groundwater, can be used to store water for further purification. Such infrastructure is already in place in many villages thanks to local creativity and help from various NGO’s.
Although various companies have built water purification systems that work with such storage, many do not have scalability for villages as a whole, and many others are not economically feasible for poorer communities. Nippon Basic, for example, has created a stationary exercise bike that also acts as a water purifier, but at the hefty cost of six thousand dollars. To truly make a sustainable and scalable innovation requires, therefore, a cheap and efficient model for water purification.
Selling units that consist of a detachable kinetic energy electricity generator and an electronic water filter, both of which have been proven feasible inventions, would better tackle the water problem in India. Electronic water filters can purify over four hundred liters of water, and homemade bicycle generators already can supply sufficient energy for their demand (Arndt, 2015). Combining these two units into a single portable device would allow people to cheaply and efficiently filter out water at an inexpensive cost. Using communal rainwater and other unfiltered water, including river and stream water, the units can attach to rickshaws and bicycles, harnessing their rotational kinetic energy to power the filtration process. Since bicycles and rickshaws serve as the primary for modes of transportation in rural and urban areas, alike, this portable invention would not require any additional infrastructure. Unlike water purification systems that are completely separate and independent of everyday life, it would play an ancillary role in daily life. The device would ultimately chip away at the daunting problem of obtaining safe drinking water in India from abundant sources of unfiltered water using a simple attachment to everyday devices.
The units, along with having practical value, could also be economically attractive to local communities. Rickshaw drivers and people who ride their bicycles often could gain from using such devices by selling the clean water at a low price. This would add a monetary incentive to filtration, so even those who do not know the benefits of clean water would take part in the purification process as a means for economic profit. The device owners could also rent out the apparatus at a low price, encouraging people to purchase the equipment while giving more people the ability to filter their own water. As a result, the innovation could lead to sustainable business and, therefore, encourage the persistence of water purification in poor underserved regions.
Since the innovation does not rely on governmental intervention and centralized policy change in India, the innovation has a large possibility for scalability. The units will have a significant reach in any rural and urban community where water is abundant, such as in rainy areas or in areas surrounded by water, but clean water is not. Any region where bicycle power is the primary means of transportation would benefit from the innovation, expanding the sustainable innovation’s possible outreach to a global scale.