 "Jal Shakti Ministry to go ahead with Bureau of Water Efficiency")
The roads of Lal Bagh in Azadpur, one of Delhi’s biggest slums, are hidden under a thick layer of slime. Open urinals on the roadside let their discharge flow out on the pavement. The men gamble away their lives, while children play amid the filth, rather than go to school. The women shuffle between selling bidis and pan masala and doing their household chores.
Amid this grime, stands a beacon, a water filter for the community. Is it any good? “Bilkul (Definitely)! Earlier we used to get water from the corporation tanker. Now we drink RO,” the locals defend it. They are referring to water cleaned through reverse osmosis, the technology put to use in the water filtration unit. This has been made possible by a group of students of Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) working under the identity of Project Asbah. Asbah means pure in Arabic.
The 1,000 litres per hour unit installed at Azadpur offers 20 litres of water for Rs 4. A similar quantity in the market would be five to six times costlier. Sarita, one of the two operators managing the unit says, “This measure has especially impacted daily-wage earners who can’t bear the steep cost of installing a domestic water filter.” As one of the co-founders explains, their original plan included “terafil” (terracotta filters) fitted atop specially designed clay pots. Though they would last three years, the cost was Rs 500 apiece. “Then we opted for sodium chloride as the cleaning agent. It couldn’t take-off as planned because of the smell and colour pre-and post-filtration,” he added. That changed with the RO filter.
The process of installing a unit is simple. The team surveys an area with the help of a local NGO, such as Janhit in Lal Bagh, based on government reports of impure water. The raw water is sent for testing, and the level of impurity determines the filtration technique. Once the permits are received, crowdfunding and corporate donors provide the capital. This is around Rs 5-10 lakh. Then comes the human factor. The students interview local women, previously unemployed and willing to work. They are then given a situation-based test, such as they would help if a scuffle broke out, or how they’d handle an impatient crowd when the machine breaks down. Getting the job of an operator is a matter of pride, as evidenced by Sarita's beaming smile when Asbah team members introduced her as the operator of the unit. “A stable income is a big incentive,” she said.
As the unit gears up for its operations, the team knocks on every door in the locality to convince the people to use the filter unit. For the students, this means considerable effort, asking people to bring about a behavioural shift. The revenue they earn from the 550 cardholding families is spent on getting land permits and NOCs, monthly full-body machine clean-ups, annual maintenance and paying the monthly instalment of the filtration unit where a part of it was loaned-out by the manufacturer. The rest is used to pay operator salaries and commission on the surplus. The team has also arranged for the unclean water to be used at the newly-constructed government toilet nearby.
Convincing people has not been easy and there are families who depend on the water tanker from the local corporation. While everyone agrees that it is impure, that it is free is a huge factor in a place where incomes are low and are cyclical in nature. Their next target — installing water-harvesting units and door-to-door delivery of water.
On September 17, Project Asbaah won the Best Water Project award in the World Water Race 2019 Impact competition, organised by Enactus in Silicon Valley, California, USA.
