Page 358 - AWSAR 2.0

334 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
government officials to install the setup was truly cumbersome. Moreover, the difficulties increased, being a woman, I was denied permission to perform the test alone on the lakes and river banks for security reasons. With much effort and on Pune University’s recommendation, I received permission letters, for a limited period, from the PMC officials to continue my research in several lakes and boat clubs. The downstream locations of rivers in the main city of Pune were heavily polluted owing to the disposal of municipal wastes like plastic and rubber, industrial effluents, daily trash, food waste, festive flowers, and other anthropogenic activities into the river. The study was conducted for several days and real-time data from various water bodies was successfully uploaded on a remote cloud server and analyzed. I used Matlab software for data analysis and designed a graphical user interface (GUI) for data presentation, Classification Learner application to classify
the water resources into various categories based on their water quality index values. The work has been already published in various international journals of Springer, Acta Press and IGI Global. The first version of my system was a bit heavy and with limited memory. Both of these aspects have been taken care of in the second version. The development of the next version is underway which is compact with enhanced processing capabilities, more memory, and more advanced data transmission capabilities. Such a developed system will definitely benefit the rural population in terms of creating awareness about water quality, reducing pollution levels by bringing to the notice the quality status of water to the concerned authorities and stakeholders, thereby issuing early warning, preventing the damage caused due to accidental leakages of hazardous chemicals at a moderate cost and with good accuracy.