RRI.CO.ID, Central Aceh – Through the "Mahasiswa Berdampak" (Impactful Students) initiative, a team from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) has successfully provided a solution for providing potable water. The water filtration system has been implemented to assist the residents in Jamat Village, Central Aceh, a region recently devastated by natural disasters.

According to the press release of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology on Tuesday, 17 February 2026, the students scouted a new water source located 1.4 kilometers upstream with a challenging 200-meter elevation gain. They also installed over 2.5 kilometers of HDPE piping to bypass damaged terrain and ensure a steady flow.

"We built a filtration system using HDPE pipes fed through FRP 1054 tube filters to convert the dirty water into clean water, which then continued through further filters until it was potable,” Ulil Albab, a student responsible for the Filtration Program stated. He also said that Jamat Village was chosen due to its extremely limited access and availability of clean water.

According to the press release, students across disaster zones from the same university that also joined the program and its partners have established 40 water treatment installations, each capable of producing 1,000 liters per hour. A massive portable unit in Aceh Tamiang even pushes this to 7,000 liters per hour, showcasing a scalable model for rapid disaster response.

The Mahasiswa Berdampak program is a government program through the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology that mandates social contribution alongside research and teaching. This program deploys students from universities across Indonesia to disaster zones as on-site innovators.

Moreovet, they live within the community for a month (in this case, through February 2026) to implement technical solutions that local governments might struggle to deploy quickly during emergencies.