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On World Water Day, an Indian services company has vowed to make available 1 billion litres of clean drinking water to the needy people through its network of water ATMs by 2020.
“We are a social enterprise that wants to make safe drinking water available, accessible and affordable to people,” said Parag Agarwal, founder and CMD, JanaJal, which currently has over 450 water ATMs in different parts of the country including 100 water vending machines at the Mumbai suburban railway stations.
Recently, JanaJal bagged contracts from the New Delhi Municipal Corporation and Ghaziabad Nagar Nigam to install a combination of 150 fixed and mobile water systems, particularly for people living in urban slums.
“When we started off in 2013, we were installing such water ATMs in areas where the urban poor lived. Also, many corporate houses wanted us to use their CSR funds to provide safe drinking water for the poor people,” said Agarwal.
Social impact
It was only two years ago that the company decided to make it a serious business proposition. It was around that time, JanaJal won tenders from the Mumbai Suburban Railway network for setting them up at railway stations on all the three suburban routes.
“We saw that a lot of poor people living around these stations depended on our water ATMs. We realised that people are willing to spend on clean and affordable drinking water,” he said.
JanaJal water ATMs sell 250 ml of chilled water for ₹1, one litre at ₹5 and 20 litres for ₹20. Initially bootstrapped by its founders, the company secured an investment of $5 million from Tricolor Cleantech Capital, a social impact fund based in the US in February last year. “We plan to use this fund to expand its footprint and operations, which Agarwal said would touch 1,000 water ATMs by the end of 2018. “In near future, we plan to install 1,500 water ATMs at railway stations and another 1,500 at other places,” Agarwal said.
For healthy India
By 2020, he said, JanaJal will be supplying 1 billion litres of clean and safe drinking water, contributing its bit to keep India healthy. “what is also important is that we have been able to provide so many jobs to unskilled or physically disabled people in the process,” he said. On an average, each water ATM is manned by two to three persons, depending on the location.
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