This $16 Water Filter Could Save 100,000 Lives a Year

An invention from a researcher in India is helping solve the South Asian nation's H2O-contamination problems. Sixteen dollars. That’s the price of a movie ticket plus tax in Los Angeles—or of a week’s worth of coffee at a trendy java shop. Thanks to an Indian chemist, that amount of cash could also provide clean water for a year to an impoverished family in the developing world. If this will be useful for water, it has to be very cheap, have a low carbon footprint, require no electricity, and should not contaminate water sources in the process,” Thalappil Pradeep, a chemistry professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, told TakePart.

Pradeep spent 14 years developing a nanoparticle water filter system that can remove contaminants from India’s groundwater as it is being pumped. The AMRIT water purifier, which Pradeep debuted in 2012, is the first filter of its kind in India. The country's federal government recently decided to implement the pumps across the nation, an expansion that is under way, Pradeep said. He and a team of students formed a company, InnoNano Research Private Ltd., to keep up with the installation, he added.

The device comes in two sizes and at three price points, which include installation costs: The $16 version is for homes. A larger one that can be hooked up to schools or office buildings is about $500 (connecting a whole village costs $1,200). The largest purifier, which stands at nine feet tall and resembles a giant green coconut, produces about 80 gallons of clean water per hour. Globally, 663 million people do not have access to clean and safe water, according to the United Nations. In a country such as India, with its high poverty rates and underdeveloped rural infrastructure, access to clean water is particularly poor...