The 18-Year-Old Scientist Helping Bangalore's Residents Save Its Water

By Emma Sarran Webster


“You ever throw a rock in and make foam holes?” Sahithi Pingali asked her friend, because the two stood on the edge of a lake in Bangalore, India. He had not. So Pingali picked up a stone and tossed it into the water, where it broke through one of the several mounds of toxic white foam covering the surface, making a clearing that briefly revealed the otherwise hidden water.


It was a moment of levity throughout a serious mission: to combat the severe pollution in Bangalore’s lakes, which serves as one of four storylines in the documentary, Inventing Tomorrow. The film, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and made its TV and streaming debut on PBS’s POV on July 29, follows high school students from around the world who are tackling the global climate crisis through science. The teenagers spearheaded innovative solutions to major environmental threats in their own backyards: air pollution in Monterrey, Mexico; ocean pollution caused by tin mining in Bangka, Indonesia; arsenic-contaminated soil caused by tsunamis in Hilo, Hawaii; and, in Pingali’s case, toxic lake water. Each of those then traveled to the prestigious Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) 2017 in Los Angeles, where they defended their statistics for 1,000 expert judges.


There were once 1,000 manmade lakes in Bangalore, although most have been encroached on as a result of the city’s population growth. Right now, Pingali tells MTV News, a place previously referred to because the “city of lakes” is residence to just 93 — and most are severely polluted.


“There’s been some pretty dramatic events due to the extreme sewage conditions,” Pingali says, noting the “clouds of toxic foam” that float onto the streets are the result of a dangerous mixture of sewage and chemical waste, and the lakes have actually caught on fire. As The Guardian reported, the thick layers of pollution on top of the water created the best environment for flammable methane to form below the surface. “It’s just really nasty,” Pingali adds.


She was inspired to take action right after interviewing people who lived near one of the lakes throughout a school trip as soon as she was 15 years old. “Being on the ground talking to people who lived right next to the lake and seeing how the water was really made me learn that, wow, there’s this foam, and the smell, and the weeds — nevertheless there’s also all these health effects that folks are facing,” she says. “And folks are using that water for agriculture to grow crops that would be sold anywhere and carry those health effects all over the state. It really struck me that this is a really big, elaborate and really bad problem that affected a lot of people.”


and also it might get much worse. “Bangalore will be a dead city in another 25 years because of water alone,” Pingali mentioned in Inventing Tomorrow, referencing expert predictions that the growing water crisis will make the city uninhabitable by 2025.


However she isn’t willing to give in to that fate; she realized while researching the distribute that there’s a serious lack of accessible statistics on the pollution and the specific chemicals in the lake. So, she developed an at-home water testing kit and accompanying smart phone app that permits public citizens to crowdsource that intelligence which can, in turn, lead to solutions.


The kit uses electronic sensors and chemical test strips to monitor water samples and send the intelligence by way of the bluetooth to a phone. The app serves as a crowdsourcing platform for water monitoring; through it, people will assist design a water health map of the world, visualize intelligence visualizations, and increase knowledge on water safety and changes after awhile. Not only does it make statistics obtainable to each person from public citizens to governments and nonprofits, although it also serves as a valuable tool for education and awareness.


“A lot of lakes in Bangalore are being revived now, and most of that is happening through citizen action — through people who step up and mention, ‘Okay, we’re going to adopt this lake next to our community and ensure it gets fixed,” Pingali says. “I wanted to prepare it possible for usual citizens, people who have an everyday stake in the health of the lake...To have an easy way to monitor the water that they live near and the water that they consume, and not have to rely on outsourcing to scientists or attempting to dig through these complex reports.”


In America, where the app is available via SciStarter.Org, the hope objective is slightly different. Here, Pingali says, “a lot of people aren’t aware of issues as the issues are invisible. Unless you have the chemical composition of your water, you won’t know that there’s dangerous levels of certain contaminants there.” Nevertheless much of the U.S. Can access a largely safe water provide, Pingali’s kit can support people identify where the water is coming from, and also any contaminants that do exist, along with generate a greater awareness around an essential organic resource.


and thus for now, things are going well. Throughout a beginning beta test of the app in Bangalore, students tested water in 10 different lakes. Not only did they like engaging with and learning about their local environments, they also helped gather statistics on some lakes that hadn’t previously been monitored at all. “Some of these were really happy that they were able to generate the only intelligence in the entire city about a certain lake,” Pingali says.


The success continued while she competed in India’s IRIS National Science Fair, followed by ISEF. In the latter competition, Pingali earned a top award in the Earth and Environmental Sciences category. In the wake of that success, Pingali even had a planet in the Milky Way named right after her, The Hindu reported. Right now a undergraduate student at Stanford University, she’s still scaling her invention by inviting people to contribute to the crowdsourced water intelligence by categorizing a kit through SciStarter.Org.


if she is overjoyed of her accomplishments, she says making it to the national level in India wasn’t just about winning awards — it granted her access to training camps and mentorship with experts from around the nation. Getting to the international competition opened up an even larger network, exposing her crowdsourcing-reliant kit to more audiences and helping her take it to the next level.


“For the rest of my time working on this project, I’ll habitually have that validation,” she says. “Yes, this is something that a 16-year-old girl made at residence and at school; nevertheless I have gotten validation at these international levels from these qualified people. So that really gives me a boost in terms of getting more help and resources, and growing this into something bigger.”


According to Laura Nix, the director and producer of Inventing Tomorrow, “What these students are fighting for is so much more essential than whether or not they win a prize at a science fair.” As a substitute, Nix’s objective with the documentary was to highlight environmental issues while leaving the “audience with a sense of hope and with a sense of agency.”


From what Pingali has seen for now, they’ve already achieved that objective. She says she’s encountered people who were motivated to learn about their local environments, engage with the science, and take action in their communities. She’s particularly moved any time young students seem themselves reflected in the film and become inspired to get involved with science and solving issues they see.


And she believes her generation has a unique sense of purpose that comes from growing up with the climate crisis. “We’re forced to accept it in a way,” she tells MTV News. “For several people in the previous generation who didn’t have these problems for most of their lives, it’s easier for them to be in denial about the fact that they’re becoming so crucial now; while for us, we’ve never known anything else. This is our reality, so it’s not something that’s as easy to deny.”