Eureka Forbes is promoting water entrepreneurship among India's slum communities

Eureka Forbes is providing safe drinking water and promoting ‘water entrepreneurship’ among slum communities. To address problems caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, the company has started an initiative under its Community Fulfilment division. Under its purview of work, Water Shops are designed to provide drinking water solutions, empower & encourage local people to become stakeholders, create awareness about the need to purify water across the country, and create self-sustainable communities.

These Water Shops are designed to achieve the objective of creating self-sustainable villages and providing safe drinking water to masses. Water Shops’ dispensing system not only enables quick & easy access to purified drinking water to communities but also makes safe water affordable at as low as 10 – 50 paise per litre. The drinking water quality strictly adheres to all standards and requirements of World Health Organization. This model is based on advanced technology and is robust by filling up the loops related to money and water leakages caused due to ill practices by the plant operators and water mafias operating in India’s rural areas.

To make the Water Shops work, water scientists and field experts test the water conditions before setting up a particular plant. India has 17 different water conditions and Eureka Forbes has developed 7 unique technologies to combat each of them. Depending on the level of contaminants present in water, the company customizes the technology and installs a community water purification plant. Buyers can get the drinking water anytime (24×7), without any operator dependency at any of the dispensing units using their unique identification card (Water Card).

This model is based on cross-sector partnership between gram panchayats, state governments, NGOs and local communities which aims to promote entrepreneurship in rural areas. Water Shops give villagers the opportunity to not only run the plants but also sell water and generate a business module while working closely with the city based water distributors and State and Central Government. Eureka Forbes is already running fully automated water shops across Maharashtra and Gujarat, in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal and plans to establish 100 more in the next 3 years. It also runs 100 community RO water purification plants in association with World Vision across India.