India Has A Growing River Pollution Problem, And China May Already Have A Tech-Savvy Solution

As the world grows hotter everyday, we're steadily moving towards a global water crisis. It doesn't help then that the water we do have available is subject to contamination by pollution, especially in India.

But there might be a way to fix the problem, especially using technology.

Images courtesy: Reuters

According to the latest report by the National Institute for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), 70 percent of India's water is contaminated, putting us at rank 120 on the list of 122 countries in the water quality index. The report from late 2018 indicates that more 600 million Indians are currently facing a high to extreme water crisis, and 75 percent of Indian households do not have easy access to drinking water.

And that's just the situation right now. By 2020, at least 21 cities are expected to run out of groundwater, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad. Over 100 million people will directly be affected by that with 40 percent of India's population as a whole having no access to drinking water by 2030.

We'd obviously be in less of a serious situation if we weren't constantly polluting our rivers. In fact, previous studies have indicated that only about 30 percent of India's sewage is treated before being released into water bodies, but that number could very well be higher.

And China has faced similar issues, both from larger manufactories as well as smaller illegal establishments. However, one of the country's tech giants has successfully demonstrated how it can apply technology to policing this situation, and it could greatly benefit us too.

In the past 25 years at least 28,000 of China's rivers and waterways have dried up or been buried in pollutants. The country has made serious steps to rectify the situation in the last decade, setting up a 'River Management System' last year in each of its provinces.

The problem was that each of these platforms, at provincial, municipal, and national levels, were using different digital systems to track their progress and monitoring systems. As you can imagine, their data was all over the place, and they were on the verge of undoing all of their work on the ground with horrible back-end management.

So China's Internet giant Alibaba stepped in with a plan. They offered their cloud services to the 'Hezhang initiative', as it was called, even giving them an app they could use in a "software as a service" fashion. Basically, they helped the government initiative migrate its data online to a cloud platform they could all access. The bigger help is the smartphone app however, which lets authorities document things like instances of sewage discharge, illegal constructions, and water quality levels at locations.

Image courtesy: Alibaba

The next step for the company now apparently is to develop an artificial intelligence program that would be able to synthesize all this data into clear insights. That way, the government would be better able to make decisions based on regulations and policing measures.

In India, a platform like this could be a huge help, especially in remote villages. That way local authorities don't need to set up infrastructure like servers and databases to compile local data on the water bodies in their jurisdiction. Instead, all they need are their phones and a decent wireless service. All of that data is then also accessible by the central government in one location so it can make decisions based on accurate and updated information.