INFRASHAKTI AWARD NOMINEE - Prof Thalappil Pradeep, IIT Madras

FOR DEVELOPING A RANGE OF NANOTECHNOLOGIES FOR AFFORDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE CLEAN WATER
‘Water is data. It tells us how we live and what will happen to us.’
As a young boy, Professor Thalappil Pradeep of IIT Madras remembers walking through 4 km of rice fields full of water to get to school in a village near Guruvayur, Kerala. His father, a poet, would often write about water too. His career as a scientist took him to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the University of California at Berkeley and Purdue University, Indiana, but when he came to IIT Madras in 1993 as India was liberalising, the question before him was: what would he devote his life to? His interest in molecules and his inheritance drove him towards using nanotechnology to remove pesticides from water. His first patent, a product for pesticide degradation in water using nanotechnology, was in 2007. Its sale to Eureka Forbes earned the IIT Madras a royalty of over Rs 22 crore. "It stimulated something in me, that water and nanotechnology would make a greater impact on society than anything I would do," he says now, Since then his work has led him to create the International Centre of Clean Water at IIT Madras as well as developing AMRIT, which delivers arsenic free water to 1.3 million people every day at the lowest possible cost. Pesticide filtration units have reached 11 million people.. And to think his research on water has yielded only 50 papers out of his total output of 550 published papers. As a society, he says, India has finally understood the value of water. "Water is data," he says, "it tells us how we live and what will happen to us. Water data is wealth that can be used and monetised, India can be at the forefront of that."