Silchar, May 27: In village after village in south Assam’s Cachar district, when people think of clean drinking water, they look at the skies. Not for rain-bearing clouds, but for the sun. A project modelled on a successful exercise implemented in countries like Columbia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and Nigeria, is being experimented with gusto by volunteers of some NGOs in south Assam, Mizoram and Meghalaya.
Welcome to the future, when one can be guaranteed micro-biologically safe drinking water by just embarking on the innovative method of using solar radiation to kill pathogenic microbes which contaminate the water to cause water-borne bacterial ailments like bacillary dysentery, diarrhoea, typhoid, giardiasis and hepatitis A.
Christened the solar water disinfection (SODIS), the project is the brainchild of Switzerland’s Duebendrof-based NGO — the Swiss Federal Institute of Environment Sciences and Technology. It has already clicked with the people in Cachar district where nearly 1,500 families have now been reaping the benefits of the pathogenic micro organism-free drinking water.
Spearheading this popular movement of making the rural populace SODIS-friendly is Aveek Gupta, an environmentalist and a reader in the department of ecology in Assam Central University at Dargakona hills near here.
So, how does sunlight combat the pathogenic microbes in water? Gupta said the sunrays produce higher reactive forms of oxygen free of radials and hydrogen peroxides, and it is proved that such oxygen packs enough potential to kill the micro-organisms.
Gupta’s NGO — The Environment of Society of South Assam — has tied up with Pioneer Club, another NGO in Cachar and an organisation of the Meitei Manipuri women, the Chinga Meira Paibee, to spread the message of SODIS in every part of the district. The message highlights the need to improve the quality of drinking water through solar radiation.
Gupta said in order to disinfect contaminated water, it needs to be exposed to direct sunlight for a full six hours. When the temperature rises above 50 degrees Celsius, the disinfection process becomes three times faster.
He hoped a time may soon come when the government will not be required to funnel funds in the high-tech and expensive water treatment plants to provide pure drinking water.