Check, if your milk is safe to drink

Meet Avishek Barla, a23-year-old student from IIT Madras, who has come up wth innovative strip to check adulteration in milk

Do you consume milk that is 100 percent pure? Chances are that you might be drinking milk, adulterated with glucose, urea, boric acid and even detergent . To ensure that you are drinking pure milk, Avishek Barla, a final year BTech student of Biotechnology at IIT Madras, has developed a cost-efficient device that could detect adulterants in milk in seconds. The device, known as a polymer chip, is a strip of paper made of reagents.

According to Avishek, the strip has been divided into zones and can detect as many as four adulterants in a single test - glucose, urea, boric acid and detergent. He has been recently conferred with the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation award at New Delhi for his innovation. The 23-years-old wanted to develop something that could have a functional value for the common man, so he chose to work on this.

The paper strip can be bought at a nominal cost and will help distributors check211 the purity of the milk before buying it from farmers. One only needs to put a drop of the milk sample on the paper to get the results. If the paper changes colour, it indicates adulterants.
Avishek and his team have been able to detect four types of adulterants. But there are over 33 adulterants in milk, according to FSSAI. The team is working to detect the other adulterants also.