17-year-old Deepika Kurup combats water injustice with new invention

Meet 17-year-old Deepika Kurup - one of the winners whose passion for science, technology and mathematics has led to her revolutionise clean drinking water.

Watch her TEDx Talk and be inspired.

Using her garage as a makeshift laboratory, at 14 years old Deepika Kurup invented a way for people crippled by poverty to access clean drinking water. She was inspired to act on the Global Water Crisis when during her summer trips to India she witnessed children drinking water that she had thought to be "too dirty to touch".

Considering that each year more people die from unsafe water than violence her invention is revolutionary. Clean water is a universal human right and the world is now a step closer to eradicating water injustice, thanks to Deepika Kurup.

Chlorine is typically used to destroy harmful bacteria in unsanitary water to make it safe to drink. However, chlorine can produce harmful by-products and is not a sustainable method of water purification.

After extensive research into solar water disinfection (SODIS), a way to remove the harmful, unsanitary bacteria from water using sunlight, Kurup's idea was born. She noted that SODIS was cost effective, energy efficient and easy to use, but it was slow. A similar process known as Photocatalytic SODIS was developed as a way to combat this, but it also had its drawbacks.

Kurup found a way to overcome the disadvantages in these pre-existing models by combining the SODIS technique with filtration. Essentially, water percolates through a filter, which on its own destroys 98% of the bacteria. After sunlight makes contact with the water, 100% of the bacteria is destroyed. The entire process only takes 15 minutes and is just as cost effective and easy to use as the previous methods, but is safer and more sustainable.

At 17 years old now, after years of developing and improving her life-saving invention, Kurup is a very deserving winner of the Google Science Fair. She is crushing the stereotype of 'inventors' and 'scientists' being either old men or reclusive basement dwellers, according to her TEDx Talk.

Banner photo credit: Forbes Magazine

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