Everyone has a role to play!

The effects of the global situation are evidently seen at the last mile even in the most remote villages of our county.

People across the length and breadth of the country are in a similar situation with access to only essential service. Safe Drinking Water is one of them, the villagers in Pimperkhede, Maharashtra still take home water from this facility made available to them by HDFC Life.

The entire community is indoors and the market place is closed. The Gram Panchayat has been actively sanitizing the entire village and all public places for the welfare of all. It ensures people are following strict wash washing hygiene and keeping their surrounding clean. They have even given masks to the people and regularly keep a check on the same.

The operator of the machine has been sanitizing the machine and water ATM every 2 hours. He is grossly involved with the local governing bodies in spreading awareness amongst the villagers. Sarvajal team has shared posters, which have been displayed across the village (which talks about DOs and DONTs, handwashing hygiene, social distancing and maintaining personal cleanliness).  The efforts of the villagers should be appreciated as washing hands have become a part of the routine now and practice extra precautions on personal hygiene.

Operator Sanitizing the ATM

Social distancing

Along with the gram panchayat, our operator, there is another local government samiti actively engaged with the villagers to ensure safety. They also distribute ration to 10 people a day for sustaining 3 months for now so they stay home safe.

Law and order have been followed and police are on its usual patrolling rounds day and nights.

It is really heart-melting to see how each one is doing their bit to ensure we fight the tough times together and be safe.

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United We Stand

Across the globe COVID 19 seems to have disrupted the routine lives of people, only to bring together humanity. Every part of the world has its own story to say.

Our villagers have always set an example of how they come forward and stand by each other at the time of need.

Adopted by Standard Chartered Bank, a village of Kharsan in Rajasthan has set an outstanding example of compassion.

When the country has locked down for the safety of its citizen, there are many who are stranded because of being migrants to other villagers. They show how this village is home to everyone living there.

When the migrant people who are daily wage earners had no money to go back to their place, the gram panchayat ensured Govt School could house them and also provided blankets and bed to fight the cold weather in Rajasthan.

Radhe Shyam, who is actively serving the community as an operator of the safe drinking water facility by Standard Chartered Bank, provided these people food to eat and water to drink. He sanitizes the machine and its neighbouring area every 2 hours. He has also been educating the villagers on how they should wash their hands and utensils before coming to collect water. The operator ensures each one stand a meter apart from each other while standing in the queue. All the essential services including safe drinking water are being made available to the community. The Panchayat also has been distributing ration to the entire village for survival up to 10days for now.
We salute the bravery of our frontline heroes. They are true warriors who selflessly serving others in need.

  Food provided to people who are stranded in Kharsan.

Ration given by Gram Panchayat to the villagers for 10 days.

 Cleaning and sanitizing drive at the drinking water plant location.

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Efforts that inspire!!

As we see, there seems a coordinated and committed effort being put in at all levels to fight COVID-19.

In such a situation, Piramal Sarvajal’s team prepared IEC (Information Education and Communication) material to share safe and preventive measures explaining and sensitizing our frontline team members on maintaining hygiene at the ground level and amongst the communities. In our constant efforts to ensure safe practices are followed across, we would like to share how one of our operator Surendra Kadiwal from Sarmaliya, Rajasthan has been serving the community selflessly. Under Hinduja Foundation’s Jal Jeevan project, IndusInd Bank has adopted a village, Sarmaliya for providing safe drinking water; the project is being implemented by Piramal Sarvajal.

Surendra understands how people perceive the prevailing scenario and spoke about the seriousness of the situation to the villagers.

Along with being an operator, Surendra is also a youth president at “Navyuk Mandal” which is a team of four. Very enthusiastically, he says, “With Panchayat’s support, for 4 consecutive days, we were sanitizing the entire village including houses and shops. Now, we are supporting our neighbouring village Sargaon with similar activities”. He has pasted more than 50 copies of COVID awareness posters across the village as he finds them very helpful in educating the community.

On checking community member’s behaviours, he shared, that “we are consciously monitoring the behaviour of the community, and insist whosoever is coming to fetch water must wear a mask or cover their face with a cloth and stand one-meter away while waiting in the queue. We also ensure the water filling utensil is washed properly else do not allow them to fetch water from the water ATM.”

There seem to a marked difference in the consumers’ behaviours as now everyone cleans their utensils before coming to the ATM to fetch water. He also appreciated the efforts of government health workers, Anganwadis who distributed gloves and mask to all women in the village.

The community is very hopeful and emotionally taking care of each other by taking continuous safety and hygienic measures collectively in the village. In the end, Surendra shared that “Since there is going to be complete lockdown in the village, so only two members have specifically been allotted to make sure uninterrupted services of safe drinking water for the community.”

Kuddos to Surendra and his team for being a true inspiration to all of us.

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Hard work and dedication helps Someshwar come out with flying color

Devachiwadi is a small village in Pune, Maharasthra where access to safe drinking water was a concern. It was addressed when Apollo tyres under its CSR initiative adopted this village and provided round the clock access to affordable and safe drinking water to these villages. The intervention was received well amongst the community.

Very close to the purification plant about 50 meters across the location, Someshwar lived in his humble abode with his parents and cattle. During this time, Someshwar was finishing his graduation who was excited to see such a change in his village. He enthusiastically became the operator for running the purification plant and ATM at the same time continuing his studies.

He has been dedicatedly working to operate the plant timely so villagers can take safe drinking water anytime from the ATM. He realized it was important for the plant premises to be neat and tidy at all times. With his efforts and presence of mind, the plant is now surrounded by green lush plantation within 1.5years of its start. The villagers would happily come to take water from the plant along with admiring the greenery around. About 134 households are already taking water from the atm. Till date, about 358180.60 Ltrs have been served by Someshwar and his family to the community.

At times when he is out for work, his family operates the plant to ensure Safe Drinking water is available to community round-the-clock.  The income earned helped him fund his studies so he completed his graduation that had the blessings of the community.  It clearly shows the sense of responsibility he has for his community along with his own progress.

Such heroes make a difference! Let us join the movement!

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This virtual award is more valued by Ravinder!

Ravinder is a Junior Field Engineer who has been working in our school projects for 4 years now. He has installed all the machines in the Nestle school projects. School and students have been always been close to his heart.

Ravinder is an international Kho-Kho player who has played two international and 26 national tournaments with his hard work and passion for the game. He could not afford a coach for formal training as he hailed from a family that could barely make both ends meet. Because of his father’s poor health and him being the eldest son, had to take up a job to support his family. Being from an engineering background, he could manage a junior field engineer’s job in a technical company like ours.

With a job in hand he could run his family’s expenses, even got one of his 3 sisters married. He had gone through a rough time himself because he did not have enough to brush his talent. This thought gave him restless nights so he decided to coach other Kho-Kho players who could not afford to coach like him. For over a decade he has been coaching 23 girls and boys who come from very small villages without charging any fee. They are a mixed bag of govt school, college and local children who practice with him and play at national/international levels. 

He performs his tasks well and does complete justice to his job while at work. Even with a full-time job, Ravinder manages to take time off to mentor these kids. He starts his day at 4am, doing a 2hrs early morning coaching from 5am to 7pm. Again, from 4pm to 7pm these kids come to the school ground for their evening rounds. 

On speaking to Ravinder about his schedule, he says, "It gives me immense satisfaction to mentor these kids. I could not get enough training to be an international player so I can resonate their feelings. These children are hardworking however do not have financial support. I am elated to see them bring laurels at international levels. With this, they not only get recognition for their talent but also get eligible for good jobs. What more can one ask for if one can make a difference in someone’s life.”  

For the last 8 years, his team has been winning gold medals each year. 7 girls from his coaching batch have been on 3rd position consistently. Recently Mukesh Kumari one of the Indian KHO KHO team players won a Gold Medal for India in 13th South Asian Games 2019 Nepal. She is from Manana village (Haryana) trained by Ravinder Singh Saini. She studies in one of Nestle’s adopted school- Manana Girls Govt Senior Secondary School. 

His dedication to this sport and commendable passion to serve the sports fraternity has pushed him to limits. Along with his coaching sessions, job and family, he has currently taken up a bachelor degree course in Physical Education in Sports so he can mentor more children who are passionate about sports. 

While speaking about welcoming the international gold medalist winner of his team with a grand celebration, he smiles and says, “God is sending a gift to me soon, a baby is awaited”. 

Kudos to such heroes who are selflessly serving the society in whatever way they can. They definitely call for a celebration!!

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Interview of Anuj Sharma, CEO, Piramal Sarvajal as in expresscomputer.in

Sarvajal ensures cloud, IoT enabled timely and quality water supply

Piramal Group’s social enterprise is running pilots with the central Government for the Jal Shakti mission to provide clean drinking water to the people in rural areas. It has also worked with NITI Aayog to validate the working model in sixteen districts across seven states

The availability of pure drinking water is a major challenge in India, especially in rural areas. Usually, when technology is associated with water quality, it is construed as purification technology. On the other hand, Information Technology (IT) can also be a game-changer. It has been proved by Piramal Water (Sarvajal), a social foundation of the Piramal Group working in the area of providing clean drinking water in the far-flung areas of India. In a nutshell, the foundation has a setup of water purification machines across India. At times in the same premises or at a distance of few kilometres, the water is then transported to over 1700 water ATMs deployed by Sarvajal at various locations. The citizens can then fetch water using an ATM card, which can be used at any ATM operated by Sarvajal.

IT plays a multifaceted role and has an impact on the entire canvas of water delivery to the ATMs. “The role of IT begins with whether the water got produced or not on any given day. If yes, then how much? Followed by the water quality check done through sensors and finally, tracking the volume of water delivered to the ATMs,” explained Anuj Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, Sarvajal.

What Core Banking Solution (CBS) is to a bank, Sarvajal enterprise management system (SEMS) is to Sarvajal. It’s a central system to overview the purification and the dispatching system (ATMs). A platform solution with login controls. “We also work with state governments and they have also been provided with similar login controls, which help them track the data of the machines they own,” informs Sharma. It also includes the real-time tracking data from the purification machines and the water dispensing ATMs. There is an embedded control unit in the water ATM and the purification system, which connects it with the cloud-enabled backend system, which pools the water-related data – transactions, quality, volume, etc.

Every purification touchpoint has five to nine sensors based on the purification technology being used. At times, there are technologies that sense the water pressure, while some technologies don’t require water pressure to be measured.

In a water ATM, there are four sensors, which includes, among other factors like water quality, volume and flow, tracking the charging of the solar panels, which power the ATMs. In the winter season in the hilly areas, when the sunlight is scanty, the solar battery has to be charged and changed frequently. The sensors track the chargers and suggest the replenishment cycle.

The IoT enables in proactive and predictive maintenance of the purification machines and water ATMs. “It tracks water volume, quality and transactions which also means revenue tracking for us,” says Sharma. It leads to supply assurance and thus better customer relationship management. The water available in the ATM is checked using sensors and when it reaches the threshold, the cloud-enabled system intimates the concerned person in the locality and the water delivery truck is delivered before the water runs out in the ATM.

This model has proved itself in a calamity based scenario in 2016 in Shimla. “The water grid got compromised and as a consequence, few people got hospitalised and there were people who lost their lives too. The then additional chief secretary interacted with me and asked for a solution. My recommendation was to send SMSes to the ATM cardholders in that area, who were registered with Sarvajal, to inform their neighbours to use the Sarvajal ATMs for free (20 litres per family) for one month. This move got effected in just two hours sitting at the Ahmedabad control centre of Sarvajal. We submitted the water volume consumption logs and the state Government paid us for the water bills,” narrates Sharma.

Sarvajal has extrapolated this model for a water pipe model too. The foundation partnered with the Jal Shakti mission of the central Government to monitor IoT based water tracking mechanism at the village level on a pilot basis in Gujarat, Assam and Bihar.

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Women group collaborating efforts for the health of the community

'Kakkadasam village, Hosur - Tamilnadu' adopted by Ashok Leyland under JalJeevan initiative of Hinduja Foundation.

Village Water Committee is primarily formed by 8 women who are leaders of their Self Help Groups (SHGs) and they are associated with the Panchayat level federation of the SHGs, which is associated with 6 adjacent villages. The women canvas in these villages to bring more people to safe drinking water and join.

401 households have taken part via subscription to our services. These women are active and ensure that more and more households subscribe to safe drinking water and improve the health of the community while also ensuring the sustainability of the project, wherein these women can take the lead and run it.

These women have displayed a very collaborative approach in working together and enterprising in terms of taking more and more responsibilities like handling accounts, managing financials, keeping records of activities etc.


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