Graduate Students Aim to Create Running Water Notification System for Indian City
By Katie Bender
In Hubli, India, an urban city with an estimated population of over a million people, residents are forced to play a guessing game when turning on the tap. There is little clue to knowing when the water will be flowing that day, and Hubli citizens must try faucets throughout the day to catch it during the four-hour period of flow.
In order to make the lives of Hubli residents somewhat easier, a small group of UC Berkeley graduate students teamed up more than a year ago to create NextDrop - a project which aims to notify households via cell phone when water will be running in their neighborhood pipelines....
The original NextDrop team - made up of three UC Berkeley graduate students and one recent graduate - met in a class at the UC Berkeley School of Information in fall 2009 and set out to create sustainable sociable enterprises for development, said NextDrop team member Thejo Kote [MIMS '11]....
"In terms of technology, this is not anything ground-breaking - the Water Boards just don't have the capacity to do it themselves," Kote said. "I think it would be great if NextDrop becomes irrelevant, but I don't think this is going to happen any time soon."