Research Projects

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on human health as well as economic health of countries across the world. From its onset in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, world has seen several different waves of this disease with varying extent of spreading and lethality had swept through most of the nations. Each of these waves have taken a toll on the economic and medical health of these nations. Emergence of different variants are largely responsible for these multiple waves of the disease. It is extremely important to predict the emergence of variants and also to identify community spread of the virus in a cost effective manner. Surveillance of wastewater has been proposed as an important method to achieve this. While some such studies are going on in India, it is only at a preliminary state. Here we propose to setup a wastewater surveillance of wastewater in New Delhi to follow the community spread and the emergence of new variants. Virus spread will be analysed by performing RT-PCR analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 genome in the wastewater plants across New Delhi. On the other hand the emergence of variants will be monitored by performing whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 genome isolated from the wastewater plants.