Where does a city’s wastewater go? At Pirana, visitors can now ask.
A public awareness initiative at the Pirana Sewage Treatment Plant in Ahmedabad: a voice guide that visitors to the plant can talk to, in their own language, about how wastewater is cleaned and why it matters.
The Pirana plant from the air.
- The initiative
- Public awareness of how a city’s wastewater is cleaned
- Where
- Pirana Sewage Treatment Plant, Ahmedabad
- For
- Students, citizens and guests visiting the plant
- Way in
- A QR code at the plant, on the visitor’s own phone
- In
- Hindi, Gujarati, English and other Indian languages
Why it matters
The water we never think about.
- 01Every day, the water from homes across the city flows somewhere. Most people never see what happens next.
- 02The Pirana plant is built to clean up to 200 million litres of it a day, before the water is returned to the environment.
- 03Knowing this changes how people think about water: what goes down the drain, and why treated water matters.
The idea
Let the plant explain itself to every visitor.
A school group, a resident from next door and a visiting engineer all want to know different things. A notice board can’t answer a follow-up question, and not everyone wants to read English.
So the plant got a guide that every visitor can simply talk to, as many times as they like, in the language they think in.
For a visitor
Scan, ask, understand.
Scan the code
The code is at the plant: visitors scan it on their own phone, with nothing to install. It’s for people visiting the plant.
Ask in your language
Speak in Hindi, Gujarati, English or another Indian language, the way you would ask a person. Switch any time.
Get plain answers
No jargon. The answers come from the plant’s own material, and the guide says so when it doesn’t know.
See the plant
Photos of the part of the plant it’s explaining come up on your phone as it talks.
What visitors can ask
Simple questions, honest answers.
No menu to choose from. Visitors ask what they actually wonder about, in their own words, and follow up as often as they like.
- ?मेरे घर का गंदा पानी कहाँ जाता है?Where does the dirty water from my home go?
- ?સાફ કરેલું પાણી ક્યાં જાય છે?Where does the cleaned water go?
- ?What happens to the sludge?
- ?Does the plant make energy too?
Inside the plant
What visitors see as the guide talks.
Your campaign next
Something the public should understand?
A plant, a scheme, a heritage site or a health message. We’ll help you turn it into a guide people can simply talk to, in their own language.