Water problems in flood-hit areas could be a thing of the past if an innovation by two school students of the Capital sees the light.
Kripesh Kumar Swain and Kumar Biswajeet, Class VIII students of DAV Public School (Unit-8), have come up with a hand pump that can provide safe drinking water to the marooned during floods. They have named their model as a ‘Flood Hand Pump’.
Kripesh and Biswajeet’s model works on the simple concept that if the platform of the hand pump is raised by a few feet, the problem can be addressed. In flood-prone regions, there are times when all the wells and hand pumps are inundated and there is acute drinking water shortage.
The hand pump that they have developed automatically increases its height as the floods start. “Even if a flood-resistant hand pump like this one had to be raised to a higher level manually with some kind of retractable system, it still would be a great relief,” they say.
For this innovation, the two young inventors were recently felicitated by former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam at the IGNITE-2012 Competition for Children’s Innovations held at the Ahmedabad IIM campus.
The IGNITE Competition is organised every year by National Innovation Foundation (NIF) to felicitate children who come up with scientific innovations that would benefit society.
Kripesh and Biswajeet’s hand pump would be further developed by engineers and commercialised by companies. The two were among 14,889 children who had participated in the competition from across the country this year. Prior to that in October, the National Innovation Foundation had felicitated the two on Children’s Creativity and Innovation Day on October 15.
Back home, the boys were congratulated by school Principal Bhagyabati Nayak.