NEW DELHI, JUN 30 (PTI): The Centre on Tuesday called for affordable, scalable and community-friendly innovations for safe drinking water and plastic waste management in rural India, saying technologies developed for villages should be simple to use and suitable for implementation at the grassroots level.
Addressing the grand finale of the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation’s (DDWS) Innovation Challenge here, Union Jal Shakti Minister C R Patil said technology becomes truly successful only when it reaches people and is easy for communities to use.
Patil said the Jal Jeevan Mission has transformed the lives of rural families by providing tap water connections to crores of households and must now move forward with equal focus on water safety.
“The mission must now move forward with equal focus on water safety, ensuring that every household receives not only water, but safe drinking water,” he said.
He encouraged start-ups, researchers and innovators to develop solutions that are affordable, sustainable, easy to deploy and suitable for rural conditions.
The minister said water quality remains a key priority for the government and pointed out that timely testing of drinking water is still a challenge in many remote villages.
He said there is a need for portable, low-cost and easy-to-use technologies that can be used at the village level by gram panchayats, village water and sanitation committees, self-help groups and local youth.
On plastic waste management, Patil said rural areas are witnessing a rise in packaged products, leading to increased plastic waste, including multi-layer plastic such as chips packets, biscuit wrappers and pouches.
He said transporting such waste to distant recycling plants is often costly and difficult, making village-level and block-level solutions necessary to process plastic waste locally and support the circular economy by converting waste into wealth.
The DDWS Innovation Challenge, organised in collaboration with IIT Madras, sought practical and scalable solutions in two priority areas — safe drinking water under the Jal Jeevan Mission and small-scale, cost-effective and sustainable plastic waste management under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen).
According to the department, 348 applications were registered for the challenge. Of these, 90 applications under the Water Innovation Challenge and 66 under Plastic Waste Management were found complete. Three technologies each were selected under the Jal Jeevan Mission and Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen).
The department said the selected technologies will be examined further for their safety, practicality, scalability and suitability for rural areas. Based on their performance, pilot implementation may be explored in selected rural locations.
