IIT-M provides safe drinking water, waste management facilities to Vallipuram village

Richard David Webster, Director, Lien Environmental Fellowship Programme, NTU, Singapore, handing over the facilities to the community at Vallipuram in Chengalpattu on Wednesday.

For several years, the monsoon season brought with it around 10 cases of waterborne diseases every month in Vallipuram village in Chengalpattu district. So, when faculty members of IIT-Madras began working with the community to set up a library and provide computer training for children in 2022, the villagers went to them with a pressing demand: provide clean drinking water.

AquaMAP Centre for Water Management and Policy at IIT-M, which was carrying out the community outreach, drew up a project to install three decentralised water treatment plants and put in place a sustainable solid waste management programme.

Lien Foundation Environmental Fellowship programme of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore came forward to fund the project.

“In June 2024, we installed water treatment plants at the local government primary school, government high school, and the public health centre,” said Ligy Philip, Institute Chair Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, and Coordinator of AquaMAP. “Doctors who treated patients from the village noted that the number of cases of waterborne diseases decreased by several counts subsequently,” she said.

The drinking water plants were fitted with IoT-enabled sensors to continuously track water flow, pH, turbidity, and total dissolved solids (TDS). The data is fed into an app for remote monitoring. On Wednesday, the institute handed over the facilities to the community at a programme in the village.

The village received its water from the wells dug along the Palar river banks from where water is pumped to overhead tanks before distribution through panchayat pipelines.

While this mode of distribution continues, some of the water from the overhead tanks is routed to the new water treatment plants, which have the capacities to produce 100 to 200 litres of drinking water an hour. The whole project was carried out at a cost of ₹70 lakh, Prof. Ligy said.

Richard David Webster, Director, Lien Environmental Fellowship Programme, NTU, Singapore, said that the initiative was also exploring projects that would go into the future.