NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 8:

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and technology giant Intel have formed a public-private partnership to conduct research on water and air pollution monitoring.

“The aim of this initiative is to develop key technologies for sensing, communication and analysis of large-scale data collected from autonomous networks of perpetual/long-lived sensor nodes, followed by integration and deployment for water and air quality monitoring in real-time,” a statement from Intel said, adding that the program will be administered by the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF).

The DST-Intel Collaborative Research for Real-Time River Water and Air Quality Monitoring initiative would consider proposals from academic and research institutions in the area of such online monitoring systems and provide grant-in-aid support to the selected projects.

The government has taken steps to control discharge of effluents and waste water from industries on the banks of the Ganga and has already established pollution monitoring sensors, which can be tracked by the officials.

It is estimated that total wastewater generation from 222 towns in the Ganga basin stands ar about 8,250 million litres per day (MLD), of which 2,538 MLD is directly discharged into the Ganga, 4,491 MLD is disposed in its tributaries and 1,220 MLD on land or low-lying areas.

“In order to eliminate problems associated with manual water quality monitoring, DST and Intel have come together for development of state-of-art solutions for real-time river water quality monitoring. The goal of this research would be to enable the development and eventual deployment of low-cost, low-power, autonomous wireless sensor networks to provide a fine-grained view of several critical water and air quality metrics over large geographic areas,” Intel said.

Similarly, the initiative would also look at interventions and innovations for monitoring air quality data. Major cities in the country, however, already have 24-hour air quality monitoring centres, data from which are available online.

The initiative aims at promoting innovations which will allow help in analysing the efficacy of remedial actions on a real-time basis, the statement added.