Project Shuddhi – Safe drinking water for the underprivileged

Enactus at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata is part of a global devout student fraternity that seeks to bring about change by channeling social entrepreneurial skills of students onto real-world problems. They have two running establishments in Project Kalakriti and Project Shuddhi.

Project Shuddhi aims at providing the underprivileged with safe drinking water that was declared as a human right by the United Nations but remains a challenge for urban and rural India. Over 780,000 deaths per year in India is attributable to contaminated water. Accessibility of potable drinking water is one of the most pressing problems of this nation. To revolutionize the present scenario, the team at Enactus,SXC, has constructed a gravitational water filter that aims to improve water quality by administering low-cost filtration technique, thereby making each litre of purified water available at a nominal cost of Re. 0.085. Comprising of a terafil disc and a mineral cartridge, the filter effectively eliminates impurities like iron and arsenic.

The project has already made way into many remote areas of West Bengal like the districts of Purulia, Nadia, and parts of North 24 Parganas. Having sold over 1400 filters and impacted the lives of more than 4500 people in a very short span of time, Project Shuddhi comes off as an extremely promising endeavour, determined to uplift communities.

Project Shuddhi has an idealistic water filter, executed in a manner instilled with thought, responsibility and change. Water is a privilege that not many in this world enjoy, when it should actually be a basic right. Enactus, St. Xavier’s College hopes to manifest this dream through Project Shuddhi.