How might we engage relevant policy makers, get

them to acknowledge the drinking water needs of

Beyond the Pipe (BTP) communities, and support
interim solutions for them?
Overview:
Over the years, Piramal Sarvajal— through its “Adopt a Slum” program, has been creating safe water
access when there is a contaminated water source or limited access to the grid in a remote location
at select urban areas. However, the problem is that:

• 65 million people live in India’s 33,510 urban slums

• Indian urban water managers often experience system losses of up to 50%, causing huge
environmental inefficiencies and financial losses

• Providing piped water access to these densely populated areas is often not an option. Tanker
trucks, the current government alternative, are unreliable and unable to serve the large
population

• India’s poor ultimately pay more than the middle class does for basic water services because
of forced bribes and being disproportionately affected by direct taxes on consumption.

Piramal Sarvajal strategically leverages the Hub and Spoke design to serve the maximum number of
people in densely populated areas.

Image: Piramal Sarvajal’s Hub and Spoke Operating Model

The low-footprint public facing water ATMs in the Hub and Spoke design provide 24x7 availability of
water to the urban underserved at an affordable price.

Context:
As per the Joint Monitoring Program of UNICEF and WHO, 108 million in the urban areas of sub-
Saharan Africa and Asia are not served by any water utilities at all and 21 million out of these are from
India. Recognising this, urban water policy in India is exclusively expanding access to piped water
supply1. However, this approach is fraught with many difficulties, such as:

- laying pipelines over many kms is expensive,

- tendering processes are long drawn out, and
- significant quantities of water are wasted owing to poor maintenance of pipes that cause
frequent leakages.

Several urban habitations are not even recognised, making them ineligible for piped water supply.

Thus, till the pipe arrives, a large section of the urban population lives beyond the pipe (BTP) in
recognised and unrecognised habitations in cities. Less than 20% of the households have access to
piped water across 44 smart cities where piped water is available. The percentage is even worse in
other cities. The BTP community depends on poor quality, unreliable and expensive sources of water,
such as water tankers. This leads to significant loss of time and daily wages while queueing up and
fighting for their share of water.

Piramal Sarvajal has developed an off-grid solution involving a centralised purification hub which
supplies water to cloud connected solar water ATMs (spokes), thereby creating a reliable, affordable
source of safe drinking water for the beyond the pipe community. This model has been successfully
implemented in 2 major cities – New Delhi and Bhubaneshwar through Public Private Partnerships
with local bodies.

Image: Hub and Spoke model serving the urban underserved

However, scaling up any such off-grid model has had limited success in other cities because policy
makers are yet to acknowledge the need to serve BTP communities.

Challenge:
The current challenge is creating a paradigm shift that gets Government officials at centre, state and
urban local body (ULB) level to think about interim solutions of safe drinking water till the pipe arrives.
This would also mean regulating and supporting the vast number of off-grid solution providers, to
ensure they serve the BTP communities better.

Case Question:
How can we better engage relevant policy makers, get them to acknowledge the drinking water needs
of BTP communities, and support interim solutions for them?

About Piramal Sarvajal:

Piramal Sarvajal is a mission led social enterprise seeded by Piramal Foundation in 2008, with the
intent of providing safe, affordable drinking water to underserved communities. Sarvajal promotes
the use of community level, decentralised solutions consisting of the following components:

• Network of purification plants (depending on local contamination) and dispensing units (solar
powered Water ATMs)
• Pay –per-use mechanism wherein consumers access water via an RFID enabled smart card,
allowing them to take as little or as much water as needed
• Patented Remote Monitoring technology which leverages Internet of Things (IoT) based
devices that provide real-time data on quality and quantity of water dispensed, among 14
other indicators
• Community engagement efforts that create sufficient demand for safe drinking water,
creating long-term health impact and boosting the sustainability of solutions offered to the
community

Sarvajal currently operates in 20 states serving over 6,00,000 people with safe drinking water every
day, and had partnered with Tangram 2018 wherein over 70 IIM students attempted to solve a case
study around improving water offtake from Sarvajal’s plants and ATMs, via behaviour change efforts.

For more information, visit our official website.

Additional Links:
1
https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2019-08/CWMI-2.0-latest.pdf