Saaf Water is a platform built by IIT Madras students to address the rural population’s need for clean water. It is a user-friendly water quality sensor and analytics platform that was developed in December 2020.
Hrishikesh Bhandari was inspired to design such a program when his mother became very ill as a result of drinking polluted water. She was hospitalized till March 2021 after mistakenly consuming water from the village’s public groundwater-powered pump in Karnataka.
After hearing about similar cases of water pollution, Hrishikesh contacted his batchmate to devise a strategy to solve the situation. This inspired the program’s designers to develop a sensor that would allow rural residents to test the quality of their water and receive findings in an intelligible language. They discussed some of the possible remedies after determining the problem. Finally, they came up with the concept of developing a tester to help people in rural regions determine the quality of the water they drink and the level of purification.
The team, led by Hrishikesh M. Bhandari, Jay Aherkar, Satyam Prakash, Manikanta Chavvakula, and Sanket Marathe, intends to reach out to rural communities throughout the world that lack safe drinking water.
How SAAF Water Technology Functions
‘Saaf Water’ is an Al platform designed to convey water quality and drinking water concerns to authorities and individuals. Hand pumps are created to monitor the pH, temperature, turbidity, and electrical conductivity of water. They are constructed of cellular-enabled hardware components, are low power, and are universally compatible with all sorts of hand pumps.
Average lab tests take around 24-48 hours to determine water quality; this will take time, especially in remote locations. However, many individuals will consume tainted water at this time, endangering their health.
Saaf Water Platform delivers technology that checks the quality of the water in around 2-5 minutes and notifies the community of contamination in real-time. This system includes hardware that transmits valuable metrics to the dashboard, which connects to the IBM IoT Platform, and information that is analyzed with ML Tools to produce water quality indications.
IBM Watson and IBM Cloud assist the service to make the language understandable and water quality information available to everyone.
Motivated by the CALL FOR CODE Challenge
The IBM and David Clark Call for Code competition was created in 2018 to provide a venue for technology experts to produce parts that would address the world’s issue.
It creates opportunity for the brightest brains to collaborate and produce masterpieces to raise and address social and humanitarian issues. Inspired by Project Owl, the generated video discusses how they thought of creating a practical remedy because unclean water is a real problem.
They signed up for Call for Code because they viewed it as a way to get help and a wonderful platform to address the important issue of the day and speak out for the rights of the voiceless people in their town, nation, and globe.
Saaf Water was the winner of the 2021 Call for Code Global Challenge. The Linux Foundation awards the diligent team of geniuses with $200,000 and deployment help to give safe water to people all across the world. Around 2 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, and in order to transform the situation in a decade, the rate of assistance and progress in more than 129 countries must be doubled.
