Water ATMs try to make a splash, quench thirst

Though an entire industry has spurred around the lack of availability of safe drinking water in public places, the truth is that only a small percentage of the country’s population can afford the luxury of packaged water.

A need that has been neglected by the government has given way to innovative initiatives to provide the populace clean and fresh drinking water.

One among them is a New Delhi-based start up JanaJal, which literally means ‘water for people’. The start-up has pioneered the concept of hybrid water dispensers, christened Water ATMs.

What started as a pilot has now gradually begun to gain ground with orders from a number of state governments, pilgrim centres, and public places.

“This is not just another business initiative but a social enterprise, whose focus is on creating a viable business model and grooming youth to become entrepreneurs manning these water ATMs, and helping people quench their thirst,” says Parag Agarwal, Founder and CMD.

Explaining the concept, he says the water ATMs are a combination of appropriate technologies required to treat the water available at different sites. The company’s Supremus Aqua Water Treatment System have been used to make the filtration and purification process efficient.

Dually operated on solar energy and electricity, they can be remotely maintained and managed. They also come with different filtration processes, remove odour in the water and can be managed by a real time monitoring software.

JanaJal has the ability to eliminate the wastage of water during treatment for all river and municipal sources, while for water from bore wells the wastage is limited to around 30 per cent.

Each water ATM has an estimated lifespan of 10 years and a capacity to dispense up to 15,000 litres per day. Dispensing drinking water in quantities such as 250 ml and 1 litre at Re 1 per litre on a refill basis, people are encouraged to take away larger quantities for the consumption of their families. The start up is also considering introducing pre-paid cards so that there is no hassle of managing cash.

“The initiative was started about eight years ago, while I was working on water treatment technologies. The idea of providing safe drinking water at an affordable cost struck me. Thereafter, we worked to develop these hybrid water ATMs,” says Agarwal.

Typically, one water ATM requires an investment of about ₹10 lakh which includes cost of equipment, taxes and installation costs. “Till date 25 have been set up and we now have an order book of over 1500 ATMs across several States including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharastra and Gujarat.

“If we execute these 1500 water ATMs the funding requirement is about Rs 150 crore. We are looking at various sources, including the Prime Minister's Mudra Yojana to meet our funding requirements,” says the CMD. It has also bagged the mandate to install 100 ATMs on the river banks of the Ganga.

“Our water ATMs are now functional in Pune, Nellore, Delhi, Varanasi, Siliguri and Chennai and more than 35 million litres of safe drinking water has been delivered thus far,” he concludes.

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