Kerala floods aftermath: CSIR team aces miles to fetch drinking water

They drove 3,000 km for four days to provide potable water to South Kerala villages.

A seven-member team led by Sanjay D.Patil, senior scientist, from the Central Salt and Marine Chemical Research Institute (CSMCRI) under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Gujarat’s Bhav Nagar has travelled 3,000 km by road to supply potable water to the homes in the badly flood-hit villages in Central Kerala.

It took less than six hours for the CSMCRI team to leave Bhav Nagar in response to an SOS sent by Ajay Ghosh, director of the CSIR-National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology to his Gujarat counterpart, Amitava Das, on August 21. Shakti Raijada, Technical Officer, technicians Rahul Patil, Sunil Choudhary, Chetan Vagela, drivers Jadeja and Vikrant, are the other members of the team.

Sivankutty Nair, Technical Officer in the CSIR unit in Thiruvananthapuram, is co-ordinating the flood relief activities of the Gujarat team that has been camping at Parumala since August 25.

Quick potable water

The CSMCRI has developed a mobile Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant fitted to a bus 10 years ago, at an estimated cost of Rs 1 crore, for supplying drinking water to various natural calamity-hit areas.

The unique feature of the mobile RO unit is its capacity to produce 3,000 litres of potable water an hour, at an operating cost of just Rs 60 paise per litre, says Mr. Sanjay Patil.

The Kerala Water Authority (KWA) has made necessary arrangements to supply the treated water in vehicles fitted with large tanks to the affected areas of Pandanad, Mannar, Parumala, Budhanur, Panayannarkavu, etc., where the post-flood drinking water scarcity is at its worst. All wells in these flood-hit villages have been inundated and it may take weeks together to clean and sanitize these wells.

Working 24/7

Mr. Nair told The Hindu that the mobile RO unit has been supplying 25,000 to 30,000 litres of treated water to the affected households from August 25. The unit functions round-the-clock and the public support was immense, he said.

At present, the CSIR-CSMCRI has only one such unit and the organization is planning to set up one unit each for all the States, Mr. Patil said.

The team will be returning to Bhav Nagar in the next three days as the KWA is fast gearing up its machinery to meet the drinking water needs of the affected villages, he added.