Contamination of Water

The team met to strategise against the powerful armies of Dr. Chemicals and established a plan of action to determine the extent of impure water in their native city. We realised that understanding the water issue that the city faces not only involves the inaccessibilty of water, but also the unavailablity of water that meets the required standards for usage. The city generates 650 million gallons of sewage per day against an installed capacity of 512 million gallons. But only 350 million gallons of sewage reaches the treatment plants.

On January 7, The Team, now accompanied with a sense of purpose and a supportive coach, Ms. Dona Pal, stormed (since our excitement and sheer determination wouldn't let us settle for walking) into the main office of the Delhi Jal Board (Delhi Water Board), the government organisation that handles water supply, distribution and related issues in the city. We further conducted water testing in different areas of the city to understand which areas are in crucial need of usable water.

We decided to check the drinking water quality of different samples from Delhi for heavy metal contaminants and compare these results with their permitted concentration in terms of parts per million (ppm).

To perform this experiment, we used Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy. It is a technique for determining the concentration of a particular metal element in a sample in which three steps are involved:  Desolvation, vaporization and volatilization.
It gives the absorption spectra.

We took 3 water samples for our experiment from different parts of our city, Delhi, namely the Chandni Chowk area, Sarita Vihar area and groundwater from Springdales School, Pusa Road. We also took a sample of double distilled water for comparison.

We made graphs and tabulated the results of the ppm levels of the respective metals.

Ground water and double distilled water were found to have contaminants below permissible level whereas Chandni Chowk and Sarita Vihar water had certain heavy metal contaminants.

Distilled water is free of contaminants because it gets converted to gaseous state first and further to liquid state.

Ground water from the school  is fetched from fifty feet below ground level and the absence of sewer line in the vicinity keeps the water free from contaminants.

Chandni Chowk water sample was found to be highly unsafe due to hundreds of years old, corroded pipe lines and least maintenance. Sarita Vihar water sample was found to be highly unsafe due to the same reasons. This water leads to several problems like anaemia, high blood pressure, kidney and heart damage, cancer, and weakened immunity system.