PAANI was this year’s recipient of the Hunter Watson’s Entrepreneurial Awards for the Syracuse Launchpad Competition.
Brianna Howard and Nikita Chatterjee created PAANI to provide access to clean water throughout the slums of India. Over 70% of the slum population makes monthly visits to the hospital due to waterborne illnesses. This is a global health issue --one in ten people worldwide do not have access to clean water.
To address this problem, these young people have refined, not replaced, the water filtration systems in the slums of India so that the users can maintain their cultural traditions while getting access to clean water.
Their solution was to engineer an advanced water filtration system right into the traditional woman’s sari. The water filtration system has a sensory mechanism that alerts the user when the filter is no longer beneficial and needs to be replaced.
Editor
Hunter’s Fund