“I live in an area where we face a perpetual water crisis. We get water in the morning at a time when my parents and I leave for work and school, respectively. And mostly, there’s no one at home to turn the motor on,” says P Bishwanath Patra, a Class 11 student from the ATL Tinkering Lab of Kendriya Vidyalaya Berhampur, Odisha.

“On the other hand, on my way to school, I often came across sights that agitated me. People who received water at convenient hours would leave the taps open, letting tanks
overflow and clean water waste away into the drains. It irked me to see so many litres of water getting wasted, while my home did not have enough water for us to use every day. That led me to innovate Poseidon, a smart water dispenser,” he shares.

P Nishwanath, along with his team Sritish Kumar Gouda and Swayamshu Mandal created the prototype of a device that can dispense any fixed amount of liquid to any container.

All one has to do is punch in the quantity of water one requires into the machine in litres. It will let the water source dispense the same amount of water and automatically stop the flow.

The previous version the team worked on was a submerged motor to control the flow of water from the storage tank. But after working with the ATL, they realised that such a version wouldn’t be useful for different sources of water within a household – like for taps, for example.

The student developed a more compact version which has an electronic valve that controls the flow of water. It also has an extension into the primary water tank that monitors the flow of water. And so, not a drop of water is wasted.