Summary
The benefits of technology, innovation and industrialisation are enjoyed by us as a society, but the cost is borne only by the community striving to make those benefits available to us. Here we try to explore how through certain tools we can educate the workers’ community about the processes and ways to mitigate the problems they face.
Background
Chikkaballapur has almost 400 Reverse Osmosis plants, which solve our water fluoridation and subsequent fluorosis issues.
Story
We began our assignment with observing various interactions of RO plants with the water and the environment in Chikkaballapur. On a detailed inspection we realised how the RO plants have been negatively impacting the water quality, life expectancy, health, soil quality, groundwater reserves of the place. The unsuspecting villagers had no knowledge of how their livelihood could become their very end.
A RO plant takes in the groundwater and depending on factors like TDS, membrane quality purifies a percentage of the water, while rejecting the rest. The filtered to rejected water ratio stands at an atrocious 1:10, thus pumping the rejected water back onto the Chikkaballapur land. The TDS value of the rejected water is very high and has high salt content. When this residual water evaporates it leaves behind salt in the soil, making the soil unfit for any use. Agriculture might cease to be an option for the people living here, thus threatening their very life support. What the RO plant also leads to is lesser reserves of groundwater. This means more chances of fluoridation in the water found at deeper bore-wells. A vicious cycle thus might start destroying the livelihood of the poor.
How we came up with a solution
We started by increasing the advocacy of INREM in this area. Through our various iterations, follow-ups and feedback received from Akshay Roongta (Ooloi Labs) and Kiran (INREM coordinator for Chikkaballapur) the team decided to make a prototype to educate the workers of the vicious cycle. The objective of the prototype (called version 0) was to have a practical solution to test and verify our findings.
What this also meant was we had less than 3 days to come up with a prototype to give a visual to the workers as to what actually happens at the RO plant and how it affects their lives. Through our research probe – the prototype, we were able to show how the salt is left out and can adversely impact their livelihoods. The prototype created a visual of the invisible effects of the RO plant in the near and far futures of the workers.
What was the prototype
Through the prototype, we were able to hypothesise a sample data of filtered and rejected water ratio. We were able to achieve this by measuring the volume and quality (indicated by TDS value) of water. This experiment helped the workers be aware of how high a saline content are they dealing with. It imparted the basic knowledge about the residual water and re-enforced our suggestions on treating the water carefully.
Current scenario
Our research probe was successful in leading the workers towards the problem they are facing. What it was not able to do was to give them an accurate measure of the fluoridation in the groundwater of the area. We consider this experiment as a stepping-stone and are planning to do a follow up by furthering the use case of our probe for INREM. A user guide for the frontline workers will definitely give more perspective to our assignment.
References & Acknowledgements
The team was:
Harinie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harinie-ananth-0b295094/
Vishnuprasad : https://www.linkedin.com/in/rjvishnuprasad/
Anant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anant-kaur-8326a594/
Vipul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vipul-negi-2b2972140/
Micah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/micahalex/
