MUMBAI, India-In her college-ruled notebook turned field guide, UC Berkeley engineer Elaine Yu jots down the price of a bucket of Asian Paints next to the mural she's sketched for the National Polytechnic Girls' School.

Just across the tracks, the zinc and concrete fortress those students call home rises above the Mumbai Local station. There are more people living in this single square mile than in the entire city of Berkeley.

Welcome to Bandra East, a bustling, largely Muslim neighborhood in Mumbai, the cultural and economic capital of India.

About 40 percent of the nation's wealth is generated in this city of 14 million, where the world's rich and famous rub shoulders with some the poorest people on Earth. With real estate at a premium, nearly 50 percent of the city's residents live in quasi-legal slums like Behrampada, a crowded community that spills from across the street and into the train station itself.

It is here that Yu and a small group of volunteers from UC Berkeley called Haath Mein Sehat, or Health in Hand, have spent school breaks since 2004 working to improve access to safe drinking water and end an epidemic of diarrheal disease for the estimated 175,000 residents of this slum.

Yu and her friend, UC Berkeley student Anu Sridharan have only been in Mumbai for about 24 hours, but they're already hard at work fighting one of the world's biggest killers. According to UNICEF, "(a)bout 4,500 children die each day from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation facilities," making diarrhea the leading cause of death for children across the globe.

The slums of Mumbai are a case in point. In Behrampada, diarrhea is endemic, so endemic that few there consider it a disease.

The volunteers said that "loose motions," as diarrhea is called in India, is seen as a kind of colic, as commonplace in young children as temper tantrums or wetting the bed.

"They don't really have a term for it-it's like loose motion is part of teething," Sridharan said.

In Behrampada, six communal taps get water pressure only between three and five a.m. Most water pipes run through open sewers, making it easy for contaminants to seep in. But contamination also has human factors.

"They don't have toilet paper, so the way to clean is with water and your hand, and then you dip it in the same bin to drink your water," Sridharan said. An epidemiological study found that the water that had been boiled and stored in homes across Behrampada was dirtier than what came out of the tap, Sridharan said.

To solve the problem, the group tapped a well of funds, including a large grant from the UC Berkeley's Blum Center for Developing Economies, to design a low-cost water filter and storage tank, installing several trial units in homes across Behrampada.

At 380 rupees, or about $9.50, the tank was affordable to residents, filtering water down to a single micron-the industry standard-and storing it so that it couldn't be contaminated.

But the filter had a hidden flaw.

When the Berkeley team returned on their next visit, not one home had added the filters, Yu said.

"We realized that maybe it was too complicated to use, and that looks were a big deal, and that people weren't buying it for that reason," Sridharan said. "I think that (Bollywood) has a lot to do with it. In the slum community a lot of times it is the expense of things, it's pride."

Where filters have failed, the group now promotes chlorine tablets, which, though less effective, can kill up to 80 percent of infectious agents.

"If the choice is between doing nothing and using chlorine, we want to promote chlorine," Sridharan said.

While residents in Sion, Haath Mein Sehat's other Mumbai project, tend to be extremely poor, most in Behrampada have steady jobs and many have bachelor's degrees, Sridharan said.

"I was envisioning the stereotypical slum image, but then if you walk into their homes (in Behrampada), if feels almost like American poverty," Yu said. "It's a misperception that all slums are not poor, but there are definitely slums that are low middle-class. They're just living in a small space, a really small space."

As for an affordable water filter for Behrampada, it's back to Berkeley and back to the drawing board, or, in this case, the margins of a college-ruled notebook.

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