Her India-born moms and dads took her to take a look at the region just about every calendar year, and it did not get extensive for the young girl to comprehend how different it was from the United States.

Just one working day, at 14 many years old, she seen little ones close to her age employing plastic bottles to collect h2o so naturally soiled she would not go in the vicinity of it. “That seriously struck me,” she claims. “That’s the only h2o that they have to drink and that similar drinking water they use to wash their outfits and cook their meals.”

“So water also affects women’s health and … how ladies can add to the economic system, because as a substitute of spending time with their household and in its place of spending time functioning and raising cash, girls have to walk several hours on end every working day to go accumulate water,” she claims. “That definitely is not a thing that I utilised to see in the United States and so I wanted to do one thing to improve that.

“Just recognizing how a great deal of an impression drinking water has on the day to day lives of thousands and thousands of people today around the world is … what drew me to this difficulty.”

This by itself will not likely resolve the disaster

In response, Kurup produced an reasonably priced and effective water purification program — a cement-like composite materials that is activated by sunlight to radically decrease the variety of germs in h2o.

The product can be molded into distinct styles: a rod put in a drink bottle a disc or pot to filter the h2o or a coating for the inside of of a drinking water tank. “I unquestionably see it as a thing that could be scaled up or scaled down to regardless of what is effective finest for the group,” says Kurup.

She received to demonstrate her invention to Barack Obama in 2012 and received a slew of awards, including “America’s Prime Younger Scientist” in 2012 the US Stockholm Junior Drinking water Prize in 2014 and the Countrywide Geographic Explorer Award at the 2015 Google Science Truthful.

But as the accolades piled up, Kurup identified that “this alternative on your own is just not heading to be what solves the h2o disaster” — the challenge is just as well advanced.

“There are a lot of various approaches to strategy it,” she says. “Some approaches might be better than other people in unique predicaments.” Her sunlight-activated content will be far more effective in sunny sections of the planet, for case in point.

Kurup thinks the alternatives lie in a blend of coverage, scientific exploration and activism. “I think it is really surely likely to be the integration of distinct remedies when it arrives to tackling these types of big issues, like local weather modify, or other environmental issues or other health care problems,” she claims.

She has just concluded a degree in neuroscience at Harvard and is about to start out a clinical diploma at Stanford.

She has been learning world-wide health and fitness policy and hopes to study more about it in the course of her degree, and spend a 12 months performing in medicine in India.

Kurup patented her know-how last yr and is exploring for a firm that is already performing in the acquiring entire world to implement it.

“Unique communities have particular desires and so I would like to see my technological innovation deployed in a place where by that group would really, truly gain from it,” she states. “There are so lots of various avenues in which you can impact the environment all around you … operating with people on an individual degree, but also doing the job on policies that can form lives on a a lot bigger scale.”

Kurup nevertheless returns to India just about every yr, and sees younger persons who deal with a each day battle for clear drinking water.

It reminds her of how the rivers that maintain us ebb and movement — they cannot be taken for granted.