Safe Water Network has been taking multiple initiatives to make clean water accessible in villages and remote areas. In this interview with TheCSRUniverse, Poonam Sewak, Vice President - Program & Partnerships, Safe Water Network speaks on the scale of this problem and innovative solutions that her organisation has come up with. She also advocates for increased corporate intervention towards tackling the issue in much more effective manner.
Scroll down to read her interview…
Interview with Poonam Sewak, Vice President - Program & Partnerships, Safe Water Network
Q: How big is the problem of water and sanitation in India?
A: With nearly 70 percent of the country’s water contaminated, the UN ranks India at 120th position among 122 countries in the water quality index. According to the NITI Aayog, 82 crore people face water scarcity, 82 per cent rural households do not have piped water supply, 16.3 crores don’t have access to clean water.
Under such circumstances, it becomes necessary for corporates to come forward and undertake water and sanitation projects under their CSR activities.
Q: Safe Water Network (SWN) has been actively engaged in solving water &sanitation issues. Briefly tell us about the journey of your organization with key milestones.
A: Safe Water Network (SWN) is a New York based not-for-profit with offices in India and Ghana. In India it started its operations in 2009. Today, SWN India (SWNI) has installed 325+ Safe Water Stations to provide safe water access to over 1.2 million people in Telangana and Maharashtra.These water stations or Small Water Enterprises (SWEs) are decentralized water kiosks, locally owned and operated by social entrepreneur or women self- help groups with the approval of local governance and are located in water quality-affected habitations in rural and peri-urban areas. The program has generated 950 livelihoods, 28% of which are women.
SWNI served as Key Resource Center of erstwhile Ministry of Drinking Water & Sanitation, Government of India, and provided technical and financial recommendations to provide piped water for each rural area Har Ghar Jal.This program is now executed under the Jal Jeevan Mission. We have recommended to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India for the inclusion of Water ATMs in the AMRUT Atal Mission for Urban Transformation and Rejuvenation program. SWN provides Technical Assistance to the Government of Karnataka for operationalisation of its 18,000 water purification plants. We work closely with the Bureau of Indian Standards forming committee and are Implementation Support Agency partners of the Ministry of Jal Shakti. Our Small Water Enterprise Alliance works with sector for convergence, knowledge sharing and scale up of the decentralized safe water solutions.
Our initiatives contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals - SDG 6.1 safe drinking water for all; SDG 5 gender equality; SDG 8 decent work and economic growth, SDG 11 sustainable cities and communities, and SDG 17 partnerships for the goals through our strategic interventions.
Q: What are the innovative solutions that you are bringing to government and corporate partners through your initiatives?
A: Surveys indicate that about 30 per cent of SWEs perform sub-optimally or shut down prematurely due to improper maintenance and management leading to loss of the capital invested, inequitable and unsustainable service delivery, sub-par quality etc. As a result, the communities struggle for their daily safe drinking water access. We brought social and technical innovations to make the SWE model robust such that it is locally operated and maintained and works with less than 2% down time. Some of the innovations are social engineering where communities understand the concept of paying for safe water and the local youth or women SHG is trained as social entrepreneur to operate and maintain the SWE. All these IEC activities and training are done using audio visual spiels in local language using a tablet.Technical innovations include digital payment through RFID cards or UPI, 24×7 automatic dispensing for consumer convenience and person less SWEs. We also have remote monitoring system for visibility to plant performance and predictive maintenance, online Complaint Management Services that keep the downtime less than 2% and monitoring and data analytics for feed-back to strengthen operations month on month. This is the reason that our ten-year-old water station is still working and the semi-literate youth or women are able to operate and maintain the Water ATM. The revenues from water sale are sustaining the local operating expense of salary, electricity bill, consumables and minor repairs. Our innovation brings reliability of safe water delivery and financial sustainability at the local level. These water stations are the pride of the community and they have strong sense of ownership.
Q: You also have ‘Water Aunties’? What exactly is the model?
A: When the whole world was busy innovating ‘the most functional method for women to carry water’ to reduce the drudgery of water carrying, we were innovating models to transform the women’s role from water carriers to water entrepreneurs, working to bring dignity and convenience to their lives and putting money monthly in their hands. This revolution of water women entrepreneurs that started from a village in Telangana became a revolution and expanded to the entire district, neighboring districts and another State Maharashtra. These women entrepreneurs are fondly called as ‘Water Aunties’ by the local community out of respect for their services.
This iJal Women’s Empowerment Program initiated with grant support from Honeywell Foundation witnessed strong participation from the state lawmakers, district administration, and local government. This encouraged mainstream participation of women promoting female entrepreneurship and livelihood generation for women self-help groups (SHGs). It is adopted as best practice by India’s highest policy think tank NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India) and globally recognized at the Stockholm World Water Week.
At our SWEs the women are economically empowered in various functions as entrepreneurs, operators, distributors, and community mobilizers.These SWEs or water treatment plants are providing affordable potable water to the entire neighborhood of ~500 households or 3,000 people and thus contributing to improving public health improvement by reduction of water borne disease.
Q: How have your on-ground activities been impacted due to COVID? How have you tweaked your project implementation in the changing scenario where social distancing norm is strictly in place.
A: The lockdown had a huge impact on the operations of the SWEs across the country whether rural or urban. Some of the challenges were inability to expand and set up new plants, affected distribution systems, delay in resolving technical issues due to restrictions on people movement, and the biggest challenge was the financial sustainability as revenues from daily water sale were impacted at the SWEs due to reduced consumer footfalls, shutdown of SWEs in the schools, malls, railway stations etc. There was added expenditure of implementing COVID safety measures of mask, disinfection of water treatment plants and frequent sanitisation of dispensing areas, hand wash and social distancing. All this had a huge impact on the already financially weak SWEs.
Sharing the experience of the SWE Alliance partners, the SWE implementer quickly adopted the COVID precautions and trained their entrepreneurs, operators and the consumers.Cashless/Digital payment system, contact less dispensing, IEC for consumers and hand wash stations and IoT solutions for repairs and maintenance of the plants during the lockdown were quickly deployed.
Q: Why should more Corporates be taking Water and Sanitation projects under their CSR activities? Please share three most important reasons.
A: Access to safe water promotes not only good health and well-being but is essential for providing economic opportunities leading to the growth and prosperity of nation.
While there is a major thrust on piped water supply by the government in rural and urban India and rightly so, there is a strong need of decentralized SWEs to be complimentary solution to piped water. SWEs are the right solution for safe drinking water due to climate change, urbanization or pandemic as they provide affordable safe water access reliably and sustainably.
Low cost, decentralized, quick to set up SWEs create a lasting social and economic impact by improving health and creating jobs.Increased corporate participation in this segment will only result in reaching out to remote areas and serving the most marginalized and vulnerable population.
We need to expand the delivery of reliable and affordable safe water through SWEs specifically at places where flagship Government schemes such as the Jal Jeevan Mission cannot reach or are yet to reach. Corporate participation will ease the sustainability of these SWE’s in terms of technical maintenance, implementation of high-end technologies and will provide enabling environment to the water entrepreneurs.
