A student team from the School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, won a grant from Technology Infusion Grand Challenge, organized by La Trobe University (Australia), to build a prototype on intelligent water supply system using AI and IoT. The team named “Aqua1” consisted of Aadhityaa M. (Department of Civil Engineering), Gopikrishnan K. (Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering ) and Vejay Karthy (Department of Computer Science and Engineering) guided by Dr. B Soundharajan (Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore).
The Technology Infusion Grand Challenge is meant for solving pressing social problems and this year’s theme was ‘Smart City Innovation.
Water security is a burning issue in the urban Indian population, the availability of water for even drinking becomes a question during the summer seasons. In India, most of the city’s public water supply is sustained by surface water resources, but due to climate change and frequent monsoon failure, surface water resources are running dry at least part of the year and groundwater reserves are depleting at an unsustainable rate. Variability in rainfall these water sources which are supposed to be perennial are dry during most part of the year.
Considering the exponential population growth and rapid migration to cities in India, extreme water stress is inevitable in the next few decades. Urban droughts are becoming very common in India, this has become evident from the water scarcity that was faced by the city of Chennai this year (2019) during summer due to which millions of people were severely affected. The adversity of the above issues could be managed to a greater extent through improved water management measures.
One of the major problems in India is the poor management and implementation strategies in the water sector. What we need is a comprehensive plan to avert the future water crisis. To achieve this, the team proposes a solution to create a self-evolving sensor based network which helps to improve the urban drinking water supply system.
