In a bid to check the spread of viruses through wastewater, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras is establishing a new research centre, under the International Centre for Clean Water (ICCW) at the institute. The research centre is set to test the wastewater in the city and make the data available to the public via dashboards. It has been stated that the facility will be gradually extended to other parts of India as well.
The centre will be a Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) research facility. The project has received funding of USD 1 million from CryptoRelief, a community that has been funding healthcare-related initiatives in India. Sandeep Nailwal, Founder of CryptoRelief, said, “We intend to help the public, policymakers, practitioners and public health officials combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic through wastewater analysis,” as stated in a press release by IIT Madras.
Professor T Pradeep, a Padma Shri awardee and Professor-in-Charge at ICCW, said, "Ensuring clean water for people needs a detailed understanding of wastewater. The ICCW team will work on building a hydro-informatics platform for the city with appropriate modelling tools to give spatiotemporal information of the data derived from WBE studies," as mentioned in the press release.
It has been stated that the wastewater will be analysed using techniques like water fingerprinting to study the chemical and biological molecules in it and by tracking pollutants, pesticides, licit and illicit drugs. Primarily, the WBE facility will check for indicator organisms and chemicals in the wastewater to which the people are exposed. IIT Madras and ICCW aim to ensure better security for the population through this wastewater-based epidemiology research. "The facility will act as an intelligence unit to track and prevent a virus outbreak in its early stages," it has been claimed in the press release.
