In 2016, when public blockades, recurring clashes and political unrest over Cauvery water dispute completely disrupted civil life in Bengaluru, Pranav Shikarpur and Siddharth Viswanath, two tenth grade students from the city, wondered what the chaos was all about. Curious, they decided to dig a little deeper into the underlying water crisis haunting Bangalore. “Since childhood, we have seen so many lakes and water bodies in and around Bengaluru. So why do we need to depend on Cauvery water from 140 km away? This question baffled us,” shares 17-year-old Pranav Shikarpur, who along with his friend Siddharth Vishwanath have come up with a state of the art monitoring device to save Bengaluru’s lakes plagued by pollution. Their innovative device named FLoBoT 2.0 has been widely acclaimed and awarded. In May 2018, the duo was selected for the prestigious Ashoka Youth Venture.

Pranav Shikarpur and Siddharth Viswanath at Chunchagatta lake Bengaluru was once called the City of Lakes

“We learnt from our grandparents that at one point of time, the entire water supply of Bengaluru was sourced from her water bodies. Through official records of Karnataka’s ENVIS Centre, we came to know that even till the late 1960s, there were around 262 small and big water bodies in the city. Today, the number has narrowed down to 81, with only 34 of them thriving,” reveals Pranav.

Around the same time, they came across a BBC report where Bengaluru was listed among the major global cities reeling under a severe water crisis. The report emphasised that not one lake in Bengaluru had water suitable for bathing or cleaning, let alone drinking. This revelation pushed them to come up with a solution as far as practicable.

“You see, when Bengaluru emerged as the Silicon Valley of India, there happened a mass inflow of the job-seeking youth population, who soon settled here with families. All of a sudden, Bengaluru faced a severe population pressure which led to rampant encroachment of water bodies and a consequent water shortage. Moreover, unplanned garbage disposal was another new menace. Our city lacked sufficient sewage treatment plants, so, inevitably, the untreated sewage seeped into the lakes. Industrial effluents added to the crisis,” Pranav explains.

How FLoBoT came into being

Pranav narrates, “Determined to find a solution, we concluded that the first step of everything is ground data collection. That’s where our main focus was.”

For a science fair project, the teenager duo decided to prepare a basic prototype of a monitoring device that measures the various parameters of water pollution in a lake. Their one of a kind model garnered much attention, following which they got in touch with Dr T V Ramachandra from Indian Institute of Science who urged them to work on the practical implementation of their idea.

FLoBoT

The brilliant boys used their genius scientific know-how to put together the first version of FLoBoT, contributing around 15 thousand rupees from their own pocket money. Soon it was upgraded to the smarter Flobot 2.0 – for which they raised around 1.5 lakhs of manufacturing cost via crowdfunding. The success of the first FLoBoT has already made headlines, which made people from all over the world pour in their support generously.

The pollution levels in the lakes were shocking

Pranav and Siddarth have installed their machine and collected data from about 10-12 lakes in Bengaluru so far, including the alarmingly polluted Puttenhalli, Alahalli, Chunchughatta, Kaggadaspura and Hulimavu lakes.

“In Puttenhalli lake, there was a sewage inlet from the local residential area where people used to dump garbage as well. Following heavy rains, the sewage pipeline got clogged with solid waste and burst. Overnight, more than 500 fish died in the lake. We could see the dead fish floating all over the lake; it was a gruesome sight,” Pranav shares his experiences on the ground.

FLoBoT in Puttenhalli lake

While working in Alahalli lake, Pranav was confused to notice the heat map displaying a giant red zone in one part of the lake. To his shock, he discovered it was a drain where blood was flowing in from a local slaughterhouse.

What FLoBoT does

According to the makers, FLoBoT is the first-ever water quality monitoring device in the world which is compact, portable and cost-effective, with lab-level accuracy. The advanced ones built by an Australian company cost around 30 lakhs each and take up the size of a room. Those are practically inconvenient for use in Indian lakes already shrinking due to encroachment.

Apart from its consumer-friendly features, FLoBoT also has the upper hand over the traditional method of laboratory testing of water sample from a particular area of a lake. The machine has thrusters attached to it which allow it to revolve around the entire lake, while its sensors record the data immediately. The heat mapping feature can let anyone and everyone to easil…