Student’s innovation to check purity of food - Fusion - WeRIndia

Now-a-days, food adulteration and usage of pesticides are major burning issues. It is very difficult to find out the adulteration or pesticides in food.

Moreover, most of the existing ways are expensive. Hence, many people spend more money to buy organic foods. However, the purity of these substances cannot be easily identified.

In order to solve this issue, Hemalatha Rajendran, a recent graduate from St Joseph’s College of Engineering, Chennai designed an innovative way.

It is a simple test to detect the pesticides in food. The purity of organic substances can also be decided using the test.

Hemalatha is based in Chennai. Her father is a driver in Tamil Nadu and mother is a homemaker.

She holds a B tech in biotechnology degree. She designed this test as part of her project in the last year of her course.

She started her work with checking of milk for adulteration. Milk is mainly contaminated with urea, detergent and soda. To test milk, she used A4 sheets that contains a reagent like litmus paper.

If you want to check the quality of milk, just dip this paper in the milk and the adulteration will be indicated by the color change of the strip.

It turns from pale yellow to a brighter shade if the milk is adulterated with urea.

She found that these papers can also be used to detect the presence of pesticides like urea in the food substances.

If you want to test vegetables and fruits, pour the drops of vegetable or fruit extract on the strip which in turn will be turned to blue if there is any presence of chemicals or pesticides in them.

Her pesticide detection tool is made from decolorized sketch cartridge by adding with reagent. It works on colorimetric method which is simple even for a common man. Its life is 10 days and 10 strips of kit is available for ₹5.

Hemalatha has been awarded the Innovative Project Award for her innovation by the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

She aims to work with the DRDO. She also wants to improve the shelf life of her product.

Image Reference: Yourstory