Today our discussion focused on the water aspect of our project, although several waster-based solutions tied into food and agriculture. I will break down our progress and discussion in the following chunks for ease of reading and skimming:
Technologies we focused on: Looked at a variety of filtration systems and water waste management and distribution systems. Some current forms of distributing the water filtration system include UV-LED sanitization, using ceramic membranes and and various types of bacteria (Nereda is particular) to clean muddy and contaminated water. The crucial part here is chemical contamination because many Indians currently boil their water, but that only kills bacteria and doesn’t get rid of poisonous chemicals. In particular the province Vizag is in has huge problems with flouride, nitrate and zinc contamination. As well as incredibly high levels of salinity in the water supply.
Business models we looked at and people we reached out to: Various NGO’s have started water waste sanitation programs around the world and we looked at them and tried to draw parallels with Vizag. In particular we evaluated several proposals from Royal Haskoning DHV, a prominent NGO in this field. I’ve reached out to two of the proposal heads to ask them about their opinion on implementing their technology in Vizag and about the biggest bottlenecks and surprises they encountered in their work in their various fields. We also considered open innovation and partnering with sanitation companies in developed countries to help bring their practices to Vizag. In return they would, for example, be able to reap all the benefits of whatever is extracted from the waste (ie; they keep all of the Nitrate extracted and are able to sell it for personal profit).
Our product: In the end we came up with several ideas that we would like to run by Professor Darwin but the dominant one is a platform that utilizes big data and allows NGO’s and municipalities to view water usage information in a easy to read way. We want to give people a way to quantify their proposed solutions to make them more credible. Our solution is to provide a stepping stone for other innovation – we can we can do the math and data analysis for other people in India to then run with and create their own solution. The pain point we saw was the variety of data in our research and how drastically some numbers could fluctuate. There wasn’t a single #1 go-to and vetted source for data. If we could partner with the government and become ‘certified’ for legitimacy in our numbers, we could use help many people with their own innovative ideas. The problem we keep running into in our research is lack of accurate and clear data. So our proposed solution would fix this problem for everyone else in the future who also wants to make improvements in Vizag and other cities in India. NGO’s could use our platform to gauge need, pain points and predict impact. Municipalities could use it for the same reasons and also for competitions and rankings for who is ‘most eco-friendly’ or ‘most smart’ in various policies.
The Food and Water Group

Dhruv Singhal, Jessica Lazarus, Jean Choo, Valeria Yermakova, Sidney Lee