The Challenge
- Water contamination by fluoride, nitrates, hardness and salinity is a major issue in northwestern areas of India. Over 11 million people in Gujarat alone suffer from high levels of these contaminants, but lack access to affordable alternatives or purification systems.
- In Delhi, the majority of urban slum dwellers also lack access to safe drinking water because a large amount of the water available is contaminated by leaking sewage lines.
- Reverse osmosis technology (RO) is well-suited to treat these contaminants, but RO systems have traditionally been limited to "high-end" customers due to their high initial capital costs and the continued cost of operation and skilled maintenance.
The Innovation
- Environment Planning Group Limited (EPGL), a for-profit organization based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, has developed a strong expertise in designing RO systems. It has pioneered a new model for small clusters that drastically reduces the initial installation costs and simplifies the maintenance of community water systems.
- The business model developed by EPGL enables communities to contribute a small secured building and the labor costs for plant operation, thereby lowering the price of water to the end consumer. EPGL will also work with the Gujarat Government's Water and Sanitary Management Organization to partially subsidize communities interested in investing in a filtration system.
The Impact
- Currently, EPGL operates 10 self-sustaining water filtration plants in Gujarat. With Acumen Fund's investment, EPGL will now begin to scale up the reach of its services, initially targeting 23 rural communities in Gujarat and 2 communities in an urban slum area of Delhi.
- Each system will have the capacity to meet the daily needs of 500 households, together serving over 60,000 people. With ambitions to launch a much larger scale-up in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Delhi after its initial expansion, EPGL has the potential to make high-quality water affordable to millions of people who currently lack access.