ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2025
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. This year, 60,000+ young leaders applied to join the Class of 2025 on 7,000+ campuses across 170 nations. 290+ campuses worldwide (less than 5%) were selected to host the 4,500+ Millennium Fellows.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT ARPIT KUMAR, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2025.
Manipal Academy of Higher Education | Manipal, India | Advancing SDG 6, SDG 6 & UNAI 9
" I am excited to be a Millennium Fellow because it offers a global platform to collaborate with like-minded change makers and amplify the impact of our clean water innovations. I do this work because access to safe drinking water is not just a scientific challenge — it is a human right, and I believe technology and research must directly serve communities in need. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Magnetic Arsenic Mitigation for Drinking Water
The project is serving rural populations in arsenic-affected regions of India, particularly school children and marginalized households in districts like Bhojpur (Bihar) and planned sites in Raichur and Yadgir (Karnataka), who lack access to safe drinking water due to groundwater contamination.
The target audience includes school communities, rural families, and underserved communities relying on arsenic-contaminated groundwater as their primary drinking source. The intervention aims to deliver safe, arsenic-free water through sustainable, low-maintenance technology.
The project addressed the widespread problem of arsenic-contaminated groundwater by designing and fabricating four MARU-L series Magnetic Arsenic Removal Units (MARU). These units were fully constructed, internally tested, and made field-ready to serve around 1,000 rural beneficiaries. A significant milestone was the successful full-scale deployment of a larger MARU-XL system at a school in Bihar, delivering arsenic-free water to 1,175 students. Despite delays in installing the smaller MARU-L units due to site allocation and magnet redesign needs, the Fellowship period strengthened the technology’s readiness and established community engagement and state-level partnerships for imminent post-Fellowship deployment.
About the Millennium Fellow
Arpit Kumar is an undergraduate student at the Manipal Institute of Applied Physics, Department of Atomic and Molecular Physics, MAHE, and Project Lead at the R&D Lab, Bihar Bal Bhawan Kilkari, Department of Education, Government of Bihar. He is the Founder and Director (R&D) at Navmarg Research and Innovation Pvt. Ltd., a DPIIT-recognized cleantech startup deploying next-generation sensor-driven and magnetically induced heavy metal mitigation strategies and methods. Navmarg is incubated at FITT–IIT Delhi, MUTBI–MAHE, and NSRCEL–IIM Bangalore. His research interests span computational chemistry, fluid–contaminant interaction modeling, and applied water science, with a technical focus on the detection and mitigation of arsenic and microbial contamination. He leads multi-institutional R&D projects with cumulative public and industrial funding, supported by DST Bihar, UNICEF, PHED, Samsung, ICICI Foundation, and other agencies.
Some of his major work includes the development of an Improved Magnetic Filtration Device for Arsenic Removal from Drinking Water and Method Thereof (TRL 8), an IoT-enabled biosensing system for in-line detection of microbial contamination (TRL 4), a trace and heavy metal (iron & arsenic) in-situ real-time detection device, and a contactless infrared temperature and distance sensing device developed during the COVID-19 pandemic (TRL 7). He is experienced in XPS, UV-Vis, VSM, AAS, ICP-MS & OES, FTIR, and FEA tools including FEMM, Ansys Fluent, MATLAB, OriginPro, and Water Quality GIS applications, and is developing skills in LAMMPS/GROMACS for molecular interaction modeling alongside various other technical skill sets.
