Team:IISc-Bangalore/Understand
Step 1: Understand the Problem
During brainstorming phase, our team started out by looking up the projects of previous iGEM teams. One of the projects we came across was Aqualose, the project by Team iGEM Imperial College London 2014. Aqualose was aimed at designing a bacterial cellulose based filter to remove metal ions from contaminated water. We started to think if we could utilize this concept in some novel way to solve a local problem by creatively taking this idea to the next level and translating it to a simple, cheap, scalable and affordable platform.
Parallelly, some of us were also working at trying to understand the problems faced by the agriculture sector in India, which is the main source of income to more than half our population. Competing for the agriculture track was what we were looking at. We noted that while the tremendous success of the Green Revolution in India has led to self-sufficiency in food production for the country, it has had many long-term repercussions which are currently plaguing the fertile bowls of the country. Meanwhile, the instructor for our humanities course shared a documentary with the class about "Cancer Express". It is the infamous nickname of Passenger Express 339. The cancer patients from Malwa region of Punjab travel almost 326 km on it daily to reach Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Treatment and Research Centre in Bikaner (in Rajasthan), the closest affordable government cancer hospital. Malwa consumes 75% of the pesticides used in Punjab. The abundance of cancer cases has been shown to bear some strong epidemiological correlation with heavy usage of organophosphates in Malwa region and its leaching into the waterbodies. This unique niche at the interface of agriculture and environment seemed most interesting to us, more so in our local context. While "global problems, local solutions" has been a longstanding motto of an entire contingent of scientific endeavours (which has been made somewhat cliché by overuse), we were inspired to reverse it to "local problems, global solutions".
We then undertook an extensive literature review to focus on the environmental impacts of agriculture in India. Pesticide toxicity has been identified as one of the mammoth problems which the Indian populace, particularly our rural populace, has been challenged with. Among the pesticides used in India, reports indicated that organophosphates had been one of the most widely used classes of pesticides in India. Furthermore, somewhat around this time, the Government of India also issued a draft notification banning the usage of 27 pesticides all over the country, many of which were highly toxic organophosphates (Class Ia of the WHO classification). However, there were other extremely toxic organophosphates which had not been considered for the ban! Furthermore, all searches for the final notification confirming this ban have been unsuccessful to this day!
These efforts led to us defining our problem - tackling organophosphate toxicity in water bodies. Another critical aspect of our attempts to have a more complete understanding of the problem was identifying stakeholders. To empathise with those affected and to benefit from multiplicity of perspectives, it was essential to identify all possible stakeholders of the project. We not only decided to identify the stakeholders at the outset, but to revisit our choice of stakeholders repeatedly, throughout each of the stages of HP. We believe that every team should spend some time to not only think about the stakeholders but also dynamically update their design at each and every juncture of their HP journey.
In this regard, we met Dr. Bitasta Das. She was the coordinator for the humanities courses of undergraduate students at IISc. Dr. Das currently serves as Senior Editorial Assistant of the Office of Communications, IISc. and has offered an NPTEL course titled "Artistic Exploration in Scientific Research and Technology".
Based on our discussions with her, we identified the following stakeholders:
