Sarvajal means “Water For All”.

We are a social enterprise that develops sustainable drinking water solutions for rural and urban populations where the quality of water is often the cause of more than 60% of common health ailments.  Our business is designed around scalable innovations, technical/process improvements, ensuring livelihoods for local entrepreneurs, and developing customized community water filtration systems that can produce ultra-affordable drinking water for the masses.  Our commitment is to make purified drinking water accessible and affordable to all.  Sarvajal is incorporated as Piramal Water Private Limited.

We’re working on two major innovations that we hope will completely change the effectiveness of our enterprise.   When we started, these were just “cool” things that a bunch of technophiles thought would be interesting to do;  Today, we’re beginning to realize the potential that technology innovations have to make dispersed rural enterprise networks like ours work.

The two things that we are working on:

• A controller (the “brain”) for our Reverse Osmosis machines – these devices route power to different parts of the machine, defining the logic by which it operates.  We’re trying to figure out how to make the logic more user friendly so that it limits the technical knowledge required of our franchisees and servicefolks AND we’re embedding all kinds of nifty sensors that will automatically  inform a central command on the activity and health of the machines.   Hopefully, this will lead to a lot of preventative maintenance and much easier / more real-time data collection on the performance of our business and that of our franchisees.  We might be able to do wonders in increasing access if we had a more reliable sense of what was going on.
• A point-of-sale dispensing device that basically gives customers a prepaid RFID card that can be “topped up” much like prepaid cellphone services.   Customers come to an outlet or a nearby distribution point, use their card, see their balance and the TDS of the water, hit a button for how much water they want and bingo @#@!  it deducts the money and dispenses an exact amount of water.   Our intent is to get real-time customer usage data to help our franchisees more strategically grow their businesses, it allows for more flexible and distributed payment mechanisms, it inspires confidence and discipline in the way our franchisees operate.   We got a grant from the Ripple Effect program run by IDEO/Acumen Fund to make this one possible.  Updates on it coming soon.

We are excited to have participated in the Ripple Effect workshop in Hyderabad last month, and to receive a grant from the Ripple Effect project, a collaboration between IDEO and the Acumen Fund that aims to enable innovations that will strengthen water enterprises.

Our grant helps us build a real-time rural point-of-sale system that will allow end consumers to have an RFID card which can be recharged with varying amounts of money as the currency for purchasing water from their local franchisee or, more interestingly, from a self-service or managed distribution point closer to their home.  The intent:  to use our machines for longer in the day, reach more people within walking distance from their homes, and, in turn, make the business more viable for our franchisees.

We will post more on our progress as we have it.

Welcome to the new home of Sarvajal.  As we grow, we decided to develop a website that gave us more freedom to share our growth with those that might be interested.   The new website will eventually help you keep track of our growing number of franchisees on a Google map visual, will show you pictures of our locations, and will share insights from our team in the field across Gujarat and Rajasthan.   Check back as we add features and share our own growth with others who aspire to make contributions to the world in ways that we hope to achieve through this enterprise.