Water contamination from domestic and industrial waste, discharge of untreated sewage and agrochemical pollutants are critical concerns for Nepal, impacting primarily on UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 3 (Good health and well-being) and SDG 6 (Clean water and sanitation). The World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies bacterial contamination of drinking water with a classification scheme based on colony forming units (CFU) per 100 ml (WHO, 2011). The risk classes are low (<1), intermediate (1 −10), high (11−100), and very high (>100 CFU). As mentioned in the ODA statement, the majority of water supplied to Nepalese households may have high and very high risks while as much as 85% of bottled water in Nepal may also be classified as intermediate to high risk. While it is clearly essential to improve the drinking water quality in the long run, the specific need for Nepal is a technology to inform the population quickly when very high risk levels of water contamination are present. The device we propose will address this need.

* In this project we act as collaborative partners and deal mainly with microbiology and biotechnology research work.

Pictures copyright: © 2019 Optical Society of America from

Haowen Liang, Augusto Martins, Ben-Hur V. Borges, Jianying Zhou, Emiliano R. Martins, Juntao Li, and Thomas F. Krauss, “High performance metalenses: numerical aperture, aberrations, chromaticity, and trade-offs,” Optica 6, 1461-1470 (2019)