Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai is a 13 year girl from Koraput, Odisha who has won the Community Impact Award at the Google Science Fair 2015 in California that has a cash prize of 10,000 USD. And her award-winning science project will definitely wow you: she’s created a a novel and cheap method of cleaning waste water from domestic and industrial sources by using a humble agricultural waste – corn cobs (known as bhutta in Hindi)!
Through her research she discovered that corn cobs were suitable adsorbents because of their high mechanical strength, rigidity and porosity. Hence, contaminants like oxides of salts, detergents, suspended particles, coloured dyes, oil, grease and even some heavy metals get adsorbed in their surface. Her discovery will open a new market value of the corn cobs which are considered as bio-waste till date. And the best part is that corn cobs are eco-friendly, cheap, locally available, easy to use and reusable!
Her inspiration to research on corn cobs was that fact that in nursery school, she dressed up as a corn cob and won the prize for the Fancy Dress Competition. Once she made a hole at the centre of a cob using a screwdriver, poured some dirty water into it and collected the extract from the other end to realize that the collected extract was free of all the suspended particles! This inspired her to search, examine and experiment whether wastewater could be purified using corn cobs.
It is also noteworthy that a lot of other winners at the Google Science Fair this year are of Indian origin.
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