Through Project Amrit, Grade 12 student Devika Raj Batra has combined UV-C sterilisation engineering, scientific validation, and a women-led community deployment model to bring safe drinking water to more than 10,000 residents of Delhi’s informal settlements — and to demonstrate what responsible technology at scale actually looks like.
In the narrow lanes of Kusumpur Pahari, one of Delhi’s largest informal settlements, access to water does not always mean access to safe water. Stored in buckets, drums, and household vessels, water often travels the final and most dangerous stretch of its journey inside the home, where contamination can continue long after the supply has arrived. Pipes and taps address the infrastructure problem. They cannot address what happens next.
For Grade 12 student Devika Raj Batra of Modern School, Vasant Vihar, that gap became both a public health question and an engineering brief. The result is Project Amrit: a gender-responsive safe water initiative built around a purpose-designed UV-C sterilisation device, a rigorous scientific validation programme, and a community deployment model now reaching more than 10,000 residents across Delhi’s urban settlements.
“Clean water is not just a resource, it is a right, a responsibility, and a relationship between a community and its future,” Devika says of the project’s central mission.
Designing for the last mile
At the heart of Project Amrit is a Compact Submersible UV-C LED Sterilisation Unit, engineered to disinfect stored household water in approximately 15 minutes. The device is chemical-free, mercury-free, and can be powered either by solar energy or a standard mobile-phone charger — a deliberate set of design decisions shaped by field research rather than engineering convenience.
The path to the current design involved meaningful iteration. The first prototype used a glass outer tube, a logical starting point for optical clarity, but one that proved structurally fragile in real-world handling. The outer tube was redesigned in transparent PVC, which delivers equivalent UV transmission while absorbing the physical demands of daily household use. That single change illustrates a principle that runs through the project’s entire engineering philosophy: laboratory performance and field durability are different problems, and both must be solved.
The device is fully sealed and low-maintenance by design. There are no filter cartridges, no chemical consumables, and no moving parts. Routine care is limited to periodically wiping the outer tube with a soft cloth to remove mineral deposits. A 24-hour continuous submersion test confirmed no leakage or short circuit, a baseline assurance that a device intended for sustained use in resource-constrained homes must be able to provide.
Affordability, too, was treated as a design constraint rather than a pricing decision. Field research established that with average household earnings in Kusumpur Pahari of Rs 7,000– Rs 8,000 per month, commercial purifiers costing about Rs 5000, and any recurring maintenance cost, permanently out of reach. A device that requires ongoing consumables or proprietary parts is not a solution for this context; it is a product for a different market. The Project Amrit unit’s long-term operating cost is close to zero.
Validation before deployment
A device that performs in a laboratory environment is not the same as one that performs in the field. Project Amrit’s scientific validation programme was designed to characterise both.
Every unit that leaves production undergoes electrical, optical, and functional calibration. Voltage and current draw are verified under load. UV irradiance is measured against a UV-C meter, with a target of at least 200 µW/cm². Critically, each unit’s disinfection efficacy is validated through pre- and post-treatment microbial testing against IS and WHO standards. As the project moves to scaled production, these checks are being formalised into a per-unit quality-control protocol — a manufacturing discipline that transforms handcrafted validation into a repeatable industrial process.
Field validation results confirmed the effectiveness of indicator pathogen inactivation. Post-treatment water samples showed complete elimination of E. coli, total coliforms, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, and Shigella. Project Amrit is candid about one more nuanced observation: total viable counts at 20–22°C showed a modest increase in some samples, consistent with the survival of UV-tolerant environmental heterotrophs — organisms that are generally low-risk but whose presence points to an area for further optimisation. Exposure-time refinement is a stated priority for the next design iteration.
Three field variables were identified as material to real-world performance. High water turbidity reduces UV penetration and may require longer exposure or pre-settling. Dark storage vessels absorb UV, making transparent or light-coloured drums more effective. And consistent user adherence to the recommended exposure cycle is essential, since lapses can lead to partial recontamination. These are not product defects, they are operational parameters that the deployment model must account for.
Expansion into each new settlement follows the same evidence-based discipline. Water samples are drawn pre- and post-treatment from household vessels and tested by accredited laboratories before a new community is onboarded. The device design is slum-specific in its engineering intent, but the contamination profile of each community is characterised independently, never assumed.
A tech platform built on gender equity
Project Amrit is built around a recognition that in many urban slum households, the responsibility for collecting, storing, and safeguarding water falls disproportionately on women and girls. The initiative therefore treats water safety not only as a health or engineering challenge, but as a gender-equity issue.
“In many homes, women carry the burden of water insecurity without having control over the infrastructure that makes water safe,” Devika noted. By targeting the point of household storage, the site of that invisible private burden — Project Amrit seeks to shift safe drinking water from an individual coping strategy to a shared community responsibility.
That philosophy shaped the project’s grassroots delivery architecture. Devika recruited, trained, and deployed 70 youth volunteers as Amrit Ambassadors, a peer-led network responsible for household education, hygiene awareness, device demonstrations, and trust-building within the community. The model addresses one of the most persistent failure modes in public-health technology deployment: adoption.
In communities where residents have witnessed many one-time interventions arrive and then disappear, sustained trust is at least as important as the technology itself. A small number of households discontinued use during the pilot, primarily due to uncertainty about device longevity or unfamiliarity with the charging process, not because of hardware failure. These are adoption-design problems, not product defects, and they are precisely what the Amrit Ambassadors network is built to address through in-home inspection, faulty-unit replacement, and direct user guidance.
As Project Amrit approaches 10,000 individuals and prepares to scale further, this distinction carries operational significance: hardware reliability is now well-characterised. The bottleneck to scale is adoption support, not device performance.
Operational architecture and sustainability
The Amrit Ambassadors model is also the unit of scaling. Each new community is supported by a locally trained network, 70 strong in Kusumpur Pahari, replicated community by community as the project expands. Ambassadors inspect devices, replace faulty units, surface issues to the central team, and run education sessions in the local language. This is what keeps quality control alive past the moment of distribution and inside sustained daily use.
Three structural elements work together to ensure the initiative’s long-term operational independence.
The first is the unit economics of the device itself. No consumables, no recurring costs, USB-compatible power: the design eliminates the financial dependencies that cause technology programmes to stall when initial funding runs out.
The second is a diversified funding architecture. The Rs 7 lakh angel investment from Mr. Aman Gupta provides an operational runway. Beyond that, the project is building three parallel distribution and revenue channels: NGO and CSR-led procurement at scale; government partnerships through state water and health departments, including the community health-worker networks already operating in informal settlements; and direct community-led distribution through the Amrit Ambassadors with micro-financed adoption at the household level. Formal endorsement from the office of Sh. Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma, Cabinet Minister in the Government of NCT of Delhi and MLA from New Delhi, opens a credible path to integration with state-level water and public-health programmes, which is where long-term sustainability ultimately has to land.
The third is operational design. Because maintenance, inspection, education, and feedback are held by trained community members who live inside each settlement, the project does not require permanent external staff to continue functioning. That design choice is what allows 10,000 individuals to be a near-term milestone rather than a funding ceiling.
Impact at scale
According to the initiative’s impact data, more than 10,000 residents are now benefiting from UV-C disinfected stored water, with documented health improvements recorded across more than 700 residents who participated in paired awareness and hygiene programming. The project is on track to expand to additional settlements in the National Capital Region, with a projected reach of more than 20,000 people by December 2026.
Project Amrit has attracted recognition across scientific, civic, and entrepreneurial platforms. Devika received the Gold CREST Award from the British Science Association, its highest tier for student scientific research. She secured Rs 7 lakh in angel investment and won first prize at the Economite Economics Competition for the innovation and impact case around Project Amrit. Batra was nominated by Member of Lok Sabha Ms. Bansuri Swaraj for the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar 2025 in the Science and Innovation category.
The story of Project Amrit has also been captured in the short documentary Measured in Blue, which follows Devika’s field deployment, device demonstrations, and community engagement in Kusumpur Pahari. By connecting water safety, gender equity, and public health, the film has extended the initiative’s reach to wider youth-led social-impact audiences, earning recognition at platforms including the One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest and Crown Wood International Film Festival.
Designing for tomorrow: Digital capabilities and data governance
The current device is fully offline, no sensors, no wireless connectivity, no cloud component, and no collection of user data. All field validation data, including microbiological samples, health-outcome surveys, and adoption rates, has been gathered through structured field research, with documented consent in the local language, and held under standard research-data protocols.
The next generation of the device may introduce lightweight digital features, including real-time dose indicators or automatic cycle timers. As the project scales toward 10,000 users and beyond, its data architecture is being designed before it is deployed — not retrofitted afterwards. If and when those features are added, three principles will govern them.
Data minimisation: only operational data the device needs to function, cycle counts, dose adherence, fault flags, will be collected. No personally identifiable information. On-device processing: feedback that helps a user complete a correct cycle will run locally on the unit, not in a remote cloud. Community consent and ownership: any aggregated community-level data will be governed by consent processes run through the Amrit Ambassadors in the local language, and treated as belonging to the community it comes from.
The project’s user base is largely women in marginalised urban communities, a population for whom poorly handled data is not an abstract risk. Data dignity, in this framing, is part of the same intervention as water safety.
What continuity looks like
What distinguishes Project Amrit from many student-led innovation efforts is its commitment to continuity as an engineering requirement, not an aspiration. The project is not framed as a one-time distribution of devices, but as a system involving local maintenance, youth capacity-building, and community ownership. The device has been designed for multi-year maintenance cycles. The Amrit Ambassadors model creates a local layer of support that can continue beyond the founder’s direct presence.
In a country where safe drinking water remains unevenly distributed despite expanding infrastructure, Project Amrit focuses attention on the last-mile problem: water may reach a household, but may not remain safe by the time it is consumed. Closing that gap requires more than a device. It requires a validated technology, a sustainable operating model, an adoption architecture, and a community that trusts and owns the solution.
As the initiative prepares for replication across additional NCR settlements, its message is both technological and human: clean water cannot be reduced to supply alone. It must be safe, trusted, locally maintained, and socially owned.
– Ajay Verma is a Chandigarh-based independent author and researcher. He has previously worked with leading consulting firms and writes on technology, business, and public policy.