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May 25, 2009 6:47 pm US/Central
U Of M Grads To Bring Clean Water To Mumbai, India
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Karthik Kumar (left), Tony Schrempp (center) and Brian Bell (right).
CBS
Anyone who's seen "Slumdog Millionaire," knows the conditions in Mumbai, India, are pretty bad. A group of recent U of M grads spent the last semester working on a plan to bring clean water to the slums.
Their proposal won a science contest. Now the guys get their prize -- a trip to India and a chance to turn their idea into reality.
We may take clean water for granted but in some parts of the world, it's a luxury.
In an unforgettable scene from "Slumdog Millionaire," a child gets locked in the outhouse, then swims through human waste to see his favorite star. It was gross, and so is a lot of the water in Mumbai.
Brian Bell and his teammates have come up with a system they believe will work. It's modeled after the Slum Sanitation Program.
"You have basically a community center almost, but it provides sanitation services. So instead of having sanitation systems in everyone's home, you just have this one place that everyone goes to the bathroom basically," explained Bell.
"What we wanted to do was kind of backbone on that success and create a water program within there as well, ran by the community," said team member Tony Schrempp.
They would sanitize, store and distribute water for a small fee.
"We are going to give them water that is 1/10 the price. It's going to be clean, it's going to be reliable, it's going to be efficient," said team member Karthik Kumar.
The team won the Acara Challenge, sponsored by the Acara Institute. Their prize is a trip to India to work on their project.
"They may may form a board of directors, maybe one of them will take it, maybe they'll find people in India to run it. I don't know. That's part of what the trip is about, to figure out how to make this work and sustain," said Acara Institute Executive Director Erin Binder.
Mumbai is the second-most-populous city in the world with a population of about 14 million.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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