Indra Water: Creating A Circular Economy For India's Wastewater - Forbes India

It all started in a small apartment in University Village, Seattle, in 2014, where a conversation between roommates sparked an idea. Though as students of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington both Krunal Patel and Amrit Om Nayak were working on different projects—Nayak on energy systems for spacecraft and Patel on underwater tidal turbines—what caught their attention was Seattle’s stormwater and its treatment.

“Seattle gets rain nine months of the year and though Seattle has wastewater treatment plants, we found that the stormwater mostly drains off and there was no cost-effective way to recover it,” says Nayak. Stormwater, he explains, is a distributed resource flowing in small streams and building a single centralised facility to clean that water is difficult and expensive.

It got them thinking about finding a decentralised solution, their goal being to create a modular, easily scalable technology for treating and recycling water. Early success got them thinking about a larger problem—wastewater from industrial and non-industrial establishments. “We soon shifted our attention to wastewater treatment, adapting our reactors to handle more complex pollutants,” adds Nayak.

As they built their first prototypes, they pondered their next move: Should they pursue their vision in the US or back home in India, where the need was greater? Reflecting on their roots and the potential impact, they decided to return to India where clean water remains scarce.

“For instance, in southern India, many businesses and factories operate only three to four days a week due to severe water scarcity. This results in a loss of revenue,” says Nayak, who grew up in Chennai. “The lack of groundwater reserves exacerbates the issue, leaving them without a reliable backup source.” Despite being home to 18 percent of the world’s population, India has access to only 4 percent of the world’s water resources, and many areas have to deal with water scarcity.

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Taxonomy

• Decentralized Wastewater