On August 27th Sarvajal deployed our first set of controllers at 3 pilot locations in Gujarat. These locations will help us measure the added benefits of the controller and see what needs to be improved before we grow to a larger scale.

The controller’s deployment did not come without some hiccups. During the initial setup phase, many of the components had to be tweaked and addressed on site. Since many of our sites have been hand-built to specification, there are onsite mechanical modifications that must be made. These sorts of issues will need to be addressed on a case by case basis. Training our deployment teams to deal with each of these cases and providing them with the proper tools is just one of the many challenges in rural areas. Other hurdles we faced during deployment were instances of power and water access issues. The issues we encountered during an upgrade process just bring to light the day-to-day challenges our franchisees face. These issues significantly slow down our upgrade process. As we move to a full scale deployment we will need to find ways to work around these rural issues.

During the first set of deployments it took us 3 days to deploy 3 controllers. Moving forward we’ll target a deployment of our controllers to take 4 hours each, allowing us to reach 2 locations per team per day. At this rate we will be able to reach all of locations in a short amount of time so our franchisees can take advantage of the new controller. The controller will allow us to offer our franchisees new payment schemes (pre-paid versus post-paid). The controller will allow us to improve our maintenance team’s responsiveness and preemptively handle issues. And lastly the controller will allow us to map out region based statistics – perhaps the sandstorms in Rajasthan are causing our filters to be damaged, perhaps the recent rainy season caused a lower demand in water, or perhaps the latest industrial plant increased the region’s source TDS. With our old system the previous metrics we were capturing was us having our finger on the pulse of rural India’s water story. Now, with the controller, we’ll have an MRI scan wherever we are.

These piloted controllers are just the opening chapter to a better Sarvajal.