No one without water

Quenching thirst

While AquaSafi is providing clean water to the people of Gadag district through local enterprises, NextDrop is eliminating ambiguities in water supply in Hubballi-Dharwad through a smart system, learns Harshavardhan V Sheelavant

When the Chicago-based Kevin Cluff came to know that 880 million people in the world do not have access to clean and safe water, the idea of H2O for Humanity crossed his mind. Kevin wanted to serve the underprivileged in the developing world by giving access to safe drinking water while also creating employment opportunities and supporting micro-entrepreneurship in rural areas.

He had a simple idea: build a state-of-the-art water treatment plant based on RO technology in every village and train the villagers to maintain it. Villagers would get 20 litre of purified water at the plant every day for a meagre amount of Rs 2. With this dream in mind, Kevin came in contact with SELCO India founder Harish Hande. Harish introduced Kevin to Sri Kshetra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP) and through them, 5 pilot projects were implemented in 5 villages of Gadag district. One of the staff members of SKDRDP introduced Kevin to the Hubballi-based Deshpande Foundation in 2011.

Eventually, Kevin came up with AquaSafi, an Indian firm. Interestingly, at the same time, Kevin happened to bump into Satvik Sarvade, an IT consultant who had returned from the US. This young man from Karnataka had one dream — to get into social entrepreneurship and make a difference in the lives of underprivileged people. “When I joined AquaSafi, I was the only employee of the company. Our RO units used to cost around $5,000 and we struggled for 6 months to get our first client. In many cases, village panchayats were not in a position to afford the cost. So, an association with non-profit organisation was a necessity to install a unit in any village. The Sandbox effort of Deshpande Foundation gave us the seed money to expand and incubated us in the Sandbox startup. In 2011-2013, we set up 50 units in the villages of Gadag district and started installing 4 new units every month,” Satvik says.

Pavin Pankajan, the executive director of Aqua Safi, says “The compactness of AquaSafi plant makes it viable for the villages to adopt it with ease. These plants are available in varying sizes. Based on the necessity and available electrical power, plants of suitable size can be installed. Usually, a plant purifies 1,300 litre of water per hour.”

Currently, there are 60 AquaSafi plants  serving about 65,000 villagers in Gadag district, Karnataka. The team aspires to install about 250 plants and is also planning to improve the technology by using solar power, remote monitoring and developing cheap auto dispensing. With the goal of making pure drinking water accessible and affordable, AquaSafi wants to save millions of people from water-borne diseases in the world. After years of hard work, now it has been proved beyond doubt that AquaSafi water plants are making a huge socio-economic impact in the rural world.

Space for more

Not only Kevin, even Emily Kumpel, a civil engineering PhD student of the University of California, USA, was taken aback by the water woes in the cities of Hubballi and Dharwad. Interestingly, her PhD topic was ‘Intermittent Water Supply in India’, and when she returned to California, she discussed the issue with her professor Tapan Parikh and a few students. That academic discussion made way to a social innovation called NextDrop, an SMS-based water
supply alarm.

The idea is to adopt smart grid-like solution and collect and share the water delivery information with the residents of the cities. A pilot project involving 230 families was implemented in the twin cities of Hubballi-Dharwad in 2014. Sandbox provided them seed money, space in incubation centre and opened up its vast network.

Anu Sridharan, co-founder and chief executive officer of NextDrop, explains, “Valve men who usually open and close valves to manage water supply in different areas will use their mobile phones to call an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to inform people well in advance about when they plan to open the valves in a particular area. These reports will be used to generate SMS updates that will be sent to local residents 30-60 minutes prior to the delivery. In addition, the residents will be contacted randomly through IVR system to verify the accuracy of information provided by the valve men. Updates from them will be turned into streaming visual data using a web-based dashboard powered by Google maps.”

This tool will help engineers track the status of valves throughout the city in real time, while crowdsourced information will help compare the feedback from residents with reports from valve men to create a feedback loop. In case of a conflict between two reports, engineers at the utility will be alerted, enabling them to address the problem. To keep the social business running, each family is charged Rs 10 per month for the services. For families below the poverty line, the charge is Rs 5.

Today, more than 25,000 families in Hubballi-Dharwad have subscribed the NextDrop service and the customer feedback is overwhelming. The idea of NextDrop created flutter at the international level and won awards from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation and Google.

For more details, log on to www.aquasafi.com and www.nextdrop.co.