Patna, April 27: Groundwater and food crops in 22 districts of the state are reported to have been affected with arsenic, leading to a scarcity of drinking water. At such a time, international students are working on projects in rural areas of the state to solve the problems through their project findings.
While 24-year-old Ephraim Gukelberger from Germany is working in a small village, Ramnagar near Maner, 40km from Patna, to mitigate the influence of arsenic, 26-years-old Guido S. from The Netherlands is working on the geological aspect of arsenic by studying its flow in the groundwater in a village near Ara in Bhojpur district. Both Ephraim and Guido are undertaking their research in collaboration with AN College in Patna.
Ephraim, who is from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany, is working on a project — “Arsenic remitation by decentralised reverse osmotic (RO) treatment in rural Bihar, India” — since March 8 this year. The project aims at filtration of arsenic-affected groundwater and measuring the effectiveness of RO treatment in such filtering.
On what pulled him to this project in Bihar, Ephraim said: “I have keen interest in water treatment as this is the most important topic among environment-related issues. In spite of getting opportunities to work in European countries, I chose Bihar, as I wanted to work on a real action project that was aimed to benefit the masses. There is an acute shortage of pure drinking water in Ramnagar and its neighbouring areas. I want to solve this problem through the findings of my project.”
Ephraim’s is the second field trial of the RO technique in Bihar conducted by students of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. In 2010, the university’s Mario Herman and Stefan Smidt conducted the first successful field trial at Bintoli in Digha, Patna.
The field trial was conducted on a tubewell at Bintoli, which showed presence of arsenic up to 450 parts per billion (ppb). According to World Health Organisation standards, the permissible presence of arsenic is 10ppb.
