Killing me softly

With your air. With your smog. With your AQIs. With your chart topping PM levels. Delhi this annual event of yours, wish we could skip!

Familiar noises echoing from the four estates are no balm to the troubled sinuses. They shout at the top of their lungs, we cough & sneeze from the bottom of ours.

Solution, now what's that? From whom, when, where & why? Since one's can't really run away perhaps we need to just hibernate or hide. Better still, grin and bear this way of lieF (sic). 

Water Crisis

At a time when major cities across India like Bangalore and Delhi are experiencing a major water crisis, critical interventions are the need of the hour. For what could work one should look at fellow nation South Africa for their handling the Day Zero crisis. The day when there is no more portable water available for use by the citizen. Here's some related coverage "Day Zero: Where Next?" (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-content-south-africa-danger-of-running-out-of-water) & "Bengaluru is dying of thirst because it’s drinking its own Kool-Aid" (https://the-ken.com/the-nutgraf/bengaluru-is-dying-of-thirst-because-its-drinking-its-own-kool-aid/).

Reverse Osmosis (RO) water purifiers are both a boon & bane for the average household. Whith supply water TDS remaining way way above the palatable levels, ordinary non-RO basic filteration machines are rendered useless. But then RO machines end up throwing away waste water to the levels of about 5 - 10 litres (depending upon various factors) for every litre of drinking water purified. A criminal waste of the precious resource!

Now we've been recycling the RO Waste water for other household cleaning, watering, etc purposes. This process might take you back in time to the days of filling up buckets of water from the supply line (a reality for many to this day), well, etc for use. Though a bit cumbersome this recycling bit works. In a span of one day we may be able to collect about 2 - 3 buckets (30 - 40 litres) of water which would otherwise have gone down the drain. All said and done, it's well worth the effort!

Towards A Clean Ganga

The hope for a clean Ganga river remains eternal in our hearts. There have been several attempts at cleaning the Ganga over time, most recently under the Namami Gange project. The goal is to get to within the acceptable water quality standards, for a clean pollution free river (Nirmal Dhara), with uninterrupted, adequate flow (Aviral Dhara). Progress however, seems rather limited/ slow, with no due date in sight for making Ganga clean again. 

For the data oriented, numbers on the current state of the Ganga are available on the CPCB website in real-time. There are some 30+ monitoring stations located at different points along the Ganga. These centres collect data from Ganga & publish it in near real-time. Beyond the rudimentary web portal of the CPCB, an API based access to the data should also be made available. This would allow other people to leverage the underlying data for analytical purposes & build interesting apps. Data can reveal insights on several aspects such as seasonal factors, flow volume, portions with pollution spikes, changes in pollution levels over time, impact due to specific events or interventions, etc. Open-sourcing data is the way to go!

Another source of data on Ganga water quality are the reports that get published by CPCB & other environmentalists/ researchers working in this area. At times the data published in the reports have been collected by the authors themselves & provide a secondary check to the numbers from CPCB & others.

Yet another, though less rigorous, option is to crowd-source the data. For various reasons (religious, tourism, adventure, livelihood, etc.) people visit different spots of the Ganga throughout the year. A few motivated people among them could help baseline the numbers on water quality using low-end, free/ cheap phone based apps & devices, & publish the results out for public use. Hydrocolor is one such phone based app developed as part of a Ph.D. dissertation, that uses the Phone camera (a RGB radiometer) to measure water quality. The app auto-calibrates to handle variations across devices, platforms, weather conditions, etc.

Similarly there is a home-made device called Secchi disks that can be used for measuring the turbidity of water. Aerial, drone & IOT based devices are also being conceived by people across the world as solutions to track health & pollution of water bodies in their respective cities. We could adapt such tools to monitor the state of the river Ganga over time as she progresses towards good health.