Samuel Benoit

Dharwad’s twin city is Hubli, or the Commercial Capital of Karnataka to those who live around here and have never been to Bangalore. All of the domestic sewage, storm water and reservoir overflow of the city flows through drains and pipes that eventually lead to one big stream, or nalla. At the point where the city ends, farms begin, and farmers happily pump up the sewage for an all-in-one irrigation and fertilization solution. Gross, right? Eating food from poopy water. But can we scientifically conclude that the poopy water is yucky?

My task has been to focus on the concern of heavy metals collecting in the food in Hubli to see if anything needs to be done in this regard to protect the farmers and poopy water food eaters like myself.

After finishing the project I was engaged with over the first two months of my internship there was a long boot-up time as we collected maps, selected sampling sites and studied different parameters and methodologies. There have been many days of frustration over malfunctioning instruments (or machines, as I like to call them) and computers, missing reagents, unavailable vehicles and feelings of scientific inadequacy. One day as my partner and I were struggling to get results from our microbiological analysis he said “I was trained to be an analytical chemist, I don’t know this stuff.” I told him I was trained to be a writer “so it’s all you, brother.”

This week the results have finally begun to trickle in. We spent the last two days in front of a magical fiery machine with lasers feeding our water samples in to it to prove our hypothesis that the poopy water must be full of poopy metals. Nickel… none, Cadmium… none, Chromium… none, Copper… none! I practically jumped for joy when we finally found some Lead. “Yay! The water is dangerous! I finally found a problem!”

Alas, after doing some control testing we found no significant levels of Lead either. Damn you, scientific method. Short of a fuller analysis of nasty microbes, there is no concern so far from the heavy metal front. Look out scientific world, here comes the most boring contribution ever.

Stay posted for a course I recently attended in Delhi on all the great stuff you can do with poop and the addition of a new member to my family who will be pooping almost constantly for the first two or three years of his life.