India CSR News Network
BHUBANESHWAR: Bhubaneshwar Municipal Corporation and Piramal Sarvajal recently signed an agreement for providing safe drinking water to the residents of the city through a decentralized community-level solution. Piramal Sarvajal, the technology partner for this project, aims to alleviate challenges in the community for safe drinking through innovative products, solution and systems in areas of water purification and distribution.
Bhubaneshwar is the first Smart City in India to initiate such a project, ensuring safe drinking water to not only the underserved communities but also the commuters. The tenure of this project is for 5 years and involves setting up of 4 hub purification units and 40 solar powered and cloud connected water ATMs.
A purification unit works on a reverse osmosis and UV based filtration technology. The water is filtered through 5 stages and the quality is in accordance with the international drinking water quality standard, ISO 10500. The filtered pure water is then dispensed through a modular RFID controlled standalone water dispensing unit.
Vasu Padmanabhan, CEO, Piramal Sarvajal said, “We are glad to tie-up with the Municipal Corporation of Bubaneshwar for providing safe drinking water solutions. The Hub and spoke model developed by Piramal Sarvajal will not only reduce chances of water borne diseases in the city but will also set benchmarks in providing low-Cost, high-quality, clean-tech and smart public service in the drinking water space.”
Piramal Sarvajal has already partnered with Delhi Jal Board, Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and Delhi Integrated Multi-Model Transit System (DIMTS) to provide safe drinking water to the city’s residents. This social enterprise has been able to successfully demonstrate sustainable community-level decentralized drinking water solutions built upon the foundation of quality control, operational accountability and price transparency. Cashless transactions, off-grid capability, pay-per-use methodology, 24×7 service availability, user-level transaction mapping, real-time impact monitoring and provision for targeted subsidies are some of the unique advantages offered by Hub and Spoke model adopted by Piramal Sarvajal.
Piramal Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Ajay Piramal led Piramal Group, develops innovative solutions to resolve issues that are critical roadblocks towards unlocking India’s economic potential. Guided by the Piramal Group’s core values of knowledge, action and care, Piramal Foundation works towards creating technology-based sustainable solutions in the four broad areas of healthcare, education, safe drinking water and women empowerment. It currently has presence in 19 states of India and has impacted over 55 million lives till date. Piramal Foundation has been featured in Best Workplaces List as one of India’s Best NGO’s to Work For 2015.
Piramal Sarvajal, seeded by the Piramal Foundation in 2008, is a mission driven social enterprise which designs and deploys innovative solutions for creating affordable access to safe drinking water in underserved areas. Sarvajal is at the forefront of developing technologies and business practices in the safe drinking water sector that are designed to make a purely market-based model sustainable in both rural and urban deployment conditions.