Chennai: IIT Madras, in partnership with Tel Aviv University, is planning to train 5,000 students from 100 institutions across the country in water literacy in the next two years.IIT-M has already launched a hybrid course on ‘people’s water data’, which focuses on enhancing water literacy, training skilled manpower in water analysis, and generating open-access datasets on water quality. So far, 701 students from India, Israel, and Africa were trained.
“We will scale training to 100 institutions across India, particularly in second-tier and third-tier cities. From each institution, 50 students will participate, beginning with online theory sessions and followed by practical workshops conducted jointly by Indian and Israeli faculty,” said professor T Pradeep from the department of Chemistry, IIT-M.After training, each student will collect and analyze 10 samples from households or water bodies, producing 50,000 water samples nationwide within a year. Alongside, students will collect demographic, behavioural, climatic, and self-reported disease data through the mobile app.This project is funded by the scheme for promotion of academic and research collaboration, Union ministry of education. “By integrating household-level data, laboratory analysis, climatic records, and AI-driven models, the project will generate actionable insights into the water–climate–health nexus,” said G Velmurugan from KMCH-Research Foundation. TNN
