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Case Study 4 - Piramal Sarvajal PDF

The document discusses India's severe water crisis and the need for sustainable water conservation efforts over the long term. It notes that 600 million Indians face high water stress and many cities are expected to run out of groundwater by 2020. The government has launched a large water conservation campaign, but past experiences show that such structures often fall into disuse due to a lack of appropriate design, accountability, and knowledge sharing. To truly address the crisis, water conservation efforts must be redesigned to ensure structures are well-maintained and effective over the long term.

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203 views4 pages

Case Study 4 - Piramal Sarvajal PDF

The document discusses India's severe water crisis and the need for sustainable water conservation efforts over the long term. It notes that 600 million Indians face high water stress and many cities are expected to run out of groundwater by 2020. The government has launched a large water conservation campaign, but past experiences show that such structures often fall into disuse due to a lack of appropriate design, accountability, and knowledge sharing. To truly address the crisis, water conservation efforts must be redesigned to ensure structures are well-maintained and effective over the long term.

Uploaded by

NKS Yo
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© © All Rights Reserved
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How might we design and implement water

conservation efforts so that their impact is sustainable


over the long term?
Overview:
India is facing the worst water crisis in history, owing to over-extraction of groundwater
encroachments of water bodies, climate change induced erratic rainfall, among others. This has led to
a declining trend in per-capita water availability from 1845 in 2001 to 1545 in 2011, which is further
expected to fall to 1345 by 2025.

Image source: Reuters

According to the policy think tank NITI Aayog, 600 million Indians already face “high to extreme water
stress” and 21 cities including Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad are expected to reach 'Day Zero -run
out of groundwater by 2020. Matters are only likely to worsen with the country’s water demand likely
to double by 2030.

Image Source: Mint

There are 256 districts and 1,592 blocks spread across all states in India, where there is over-
exploitation of groundwater. The states with the highest number of these districts are Rajasthan (29),
Tamil Nadu (27) and Telangana (24). As far as India’s most water-stressed blocks are concerned, Tamil
Nadu has the highest (541), followed by Rajasthan (218), Uttar Pradesh (139) and Telangana (137),
with several states reeling under drought-like conditions.

To bolster efforts to battle one of the severest water crises in decades through the Jal Shakti Abhiyan
water conservation campaign, as many as 446 director and deputy secretary level officers have been
dispatched to 256 of the country’s most water-stressed districts. These officials will serve as block
nodal officers, assisted by more than 400 technical officers at 1,592 blocks.

The water conservation strategies of the Jal Shakti Abhiyan campaign fall under five categories—
rainwater harvesting, renovation of traditional water bodies and tanks, reuse of water and recharge
structures, watershed development and intensive afforestation.

Context:
The groundwater crisis that India is facing, threatens drinking water most acutely, since over 80% of
all drinking water is drawn from groundwater, including most of Sarvajal’s purification plants. Some
of Sarvajal’s plants are already struggling to access sufficient quantity of groundwater. For
communities, insufficient groundwater in these plants has the potential to undo all the benefits they
get from drinking safe water. The same is unfolding at a national level across many other states as
handpumps run dry and piped water supply reduces in frequency, creating a potential public health
risk.

Current solutions being adopted at a national level involve a large-scale water conservation campaign
(the Jal Shakti Abhiyan) by the Govt. of India, to enhance storage of rainwater in traditional structures,
wells, lakes, rooftop structures, etc. through Panchayats, NGOs and individuals. Sarvajal too is looking
at such solutions to ensure appropriate supply of water to its plants, to be purified and dispensed to
communities.

Challenge:
Piramal Sarvajal’s past experience with water conservation points to the fact that laws, policies and
individual efforts may not be sufficient, since most structures fall into disuse, thereby limiting their
purpose. This is because:

• There is not enough focus on appropriate design at the planning stage, leading to limited
effectiveness of such structures
• There is no accountability mechanism to ensure that structures are well maintained
• Existing knowledge on appropriate maintenance and functionality of such structures is
fragmented and not readily available to conservation practitioners.

Thus, unless we reinvent water conservation efforts, the current momentum in the country towards
conservation may only lead to construction of structures without addressing the larger water scarcity
challenge.
Case Question:
How can we design and implement water conservation efforts so that their impact is sustainable over
the long term?

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.

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