Mike Lipman's Wonderful Essays on South Asia Pure Water Initiative (Update #1)

September 30, 2014 Dear Friends,

I left the States on the 16th of September for India. It’s now the 30th and this is the first opportunity that allowed me 30 minutes to jot down some of the happenings with the BioSand water filter project.

Our team has been on hyper drive since our arrival. There have been dozens of meetings, site visits to our network of trained organizations, meetings with individuals and spiritual leaders, press conferences and interviews and village visits to see the BioSand filters in action and hear the testimony of the villagers. We have been in mountain villages in the Himalayas and steamy jungle villages in Mysore. Everywhere we go, the feedback we are getting from the filter users is extremely positive. The filters are making a great impact on people’s health and well-being.

Our team is led by Shivani Kumar, our India Country Representative. American born from LA she epitomizes our love of efficiency and technology. With the aid of her IPhone, she can do more on a two hour car ride than I can accomplish in two days! She has made up our itinerary and it’s fast-paced with little time for sleep and no time for leisure.

We are also traveling with RamaChandre Gowda, our managing director who has run our Kolar workshop for the past 9 years and has been instrumental in our success. We are also joined by Lalit Wadher, our newly appointed Director of Resource Management and Partnerships. Lalit is from Chhattisgarh, a State in Northern India famous for rice and mosquitos according to Lalit. Lalit is a retired banker who teaches finance and banking at the post-graduate level at private institution in Chhattisgarh.

Our team is focused on taking the BioSand filter technology country-wide by training organizations that already have rural development projects and are looking for a low cost and effective clean water technology. The government has been pushing reverse osmosis (RO) technology as the answer to the water contamination plaguing the country. However, RO has some drawbacks. Fundamentally, reverse osmosis is the process of pushing contaminated water under pressure through a very fine membrane to remove all the contaminants. The process requires large amounts of electricity to force the water through the membrane. In the rural areas, electricity is a scarce commodity and they have barely enough juice to pump water from bore wells for drinking and irrigation.

Another issue with reverse osmosis is that it wastes about 40 percent of the water that stays on the contaminated side of the membrane. The water goes “down the drain” as waste water from the process. The problem is that the contamination is concentrated in that waste water and further pollutes the ground water as it is flushed from the filter. RO does remove mineral contamination like fluoride which is highly concentrated in some areas of the country with deep bore wells and causes severe health problems, corroding teeth and bones. Our filter can use surface water instead of the mineral contaminated bore well water and avoid the fluoride problem altogether.

With all the work we are accomplishing, we keep our spirits up with good humor. Lalit loves to tell jokes like “I am the King of my household; (my wife gave me permission to say that!)” RamaChandre has an IPhone full of funny videos that he passes around for our amusement. We make fun of each other with due respect and tell stories of our lives and travels to pass the time while in the car.

Of course the most fun is to go into the villages. The villagers we meet are gracious and friendly, a bit shy and curious but willing to share their stories of heartache and joys. These are the people most affected by contaminated drinking water and are truly grateful for our efforts to solve this problem for them. That is the payoff of all our hard work and efforts. To save just one life and to improve just one person’s well- being makes all our inconveniences of the difficult travel vanish immediately.

Mike Lipman

South Asia Pure Water Initiative, Inc. 11 Wadsworth Lane
Wallingford, CT 06492 USA www.sapwii.org 

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