My previous blog described an excursion to factories discharging their wastewater in the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad. As part of the program Wetskills I joined a collaboration between 11 other Dutch participates and 13 participants from India to solve 5 different water cases.
As part of team 4 I worked together with Vishnupriya. R, Amita Shaw, Darpan Patel and Maarten Klaverstijn in an attempt “to enhance the overall water quality of the river Sabarmati for the purpose of enhancing quality of life of Amdawadi in the future”.
As you might imagine this is easier said than done. Considering the local political situation, the size and number of industries, the economy, the regulations and many more factors we decided this process is to complicated to interfere with in the 10 working days we had (which due to planning were more like 2 days). Furthermore we felt the Amdawadi have the responsibility and the right to fight for these issues themselves. Therefore we looked into methods to empower them. They have to understand the situation and understand change is possible. It is important to create transparency and share knowledge. We decided to developed an app, Amrutam (which is sanskrit for elixir), that will educate and inform. Second we proposed to build a sculpture at the discharge to draw attention to it. This will in time show the Amdawadi what a beautiful site it is and how much potential it has. Our final project was a (crazy beautiful if you ask me) poster, hope you like it :)
Natasja
