[100 Emerging Women Leaders] How Mansi Jain is fostering sustainability one drop at a time

School taught Mansi Jain much more than math, science and literature. It was also where she first became acutely aware of the challenges associated with urban development and resource scarcity. 

"We had a really great sustainability teacher who instilled fear around sustainability issues in us quite early," Mansi recalls.

Her family background also played a significant role, as her father was deeply involved in sustainability, and their household conversations often revolved around topics such as plastic waste and the need for waste segregation in cities.

In school, Mansi was actively involved in environmental initiatives as the leader of the environment council. She worked on research papers focused on solid waste management and creating policy frameworks for Gurugram and organised recycling drives in her school and nearby neighbourhoods, showcasing her proactive approach to tackling sustainability issues even at a young age.

These early observations sparked her interest in sustainability, especially in cities. “With the rapid pace of urbanisation across India and other emerging markets, I felt more and more the urgent need to address these issues, particularly in the context of climate change,” says Mansi.

Her passion for sustainability led her to Stanford University, where she studied environmental economics and took courses across various disciplines to gain an interdisciplinary perspective. 

"I was very clear that I wanted to tackle issues at the intersection of sustainability and development in emerging markets," says Mansi. 

Her fellowships during college, including working on water recycling in the California Governor's office and with the Worldwide Fund in Indonesia, provided her with diverse experiences and insights into different aspects of sustainability.

Addressing challenges on home ground

After completing her studies, Mansi returned to India and saw that her city and the country as a whole had made little to no progress in solid waste management. 

“What I saw felt visceral; the solutions were all known, but it was a challenge of governance and policy frameworks and a lot of nuances around it,” she says. 

She then joined IDInsight, an organisation focused on poverty alleviation through data-driven policymaking. While there, she got the chance to collaborate with government stakeholders on various topics, including sustainability. 

This experience, combined with her ongoing exploration of urban sustainability challenges, solidified her resolve to make a significant impact in this field.

"The solutions were all known, but the challenges were around governance and policy frameworks," says Mansi. 

She began diving deep into policy frameworks for specific issues, for instance, if a construction site had excess emissions, how did the auditing and compliances for that work?

Mansi’s interest in water-related issues was piqued soon after when COVID-19 hit. “During the pandemic, I was at home with my family, and we had a lot of conversations about how facilities for treating, recycling and managing water weren’t working,” she says.

In 2021, amidst the growing urgency of issues like air pollution and solid waste management, Mansi co-founded Digital Paani with her father, Rajesh Jain.

The company was created to fill the gaps that water treatment and recycling facilities did not fill in terms of performance. 

“While most facilities have the infrastructure for these processes, we’ve seen that they don’t perform as they should. A lot of these facilities end up with inconsistencies in operations, and discharging untreated wastewater incautiously,” says Mansi.

Creating water-focused solutions

Digital Paani tackles issues such as lack of expertise, reliance on manpower availability, and shortage of skilled personnel by offering an integrated software platform and automated hardware tools. 

For example, if a sewage treatment plant is defunct, Digital Paani would install sensors in key parts of the plant, including proprietary innovations to detect problems. 

These solutions enable water treatment facilities to operate at their full potential. By providing the necessary expertise and streamlining operations through comprehensive task management and automation, they help reduce operational costs over time.

“Once we onboard an asset, we get down to understanding how it is ideally supposed to be operated. We then see how it's actually working. We get all this information through sensors or electrical data from the equipment,” says Mansi. 

“We then use this knowledge as inputs for the design parameters of our software. So, we don’t just stop with identifying and telling the problem, but also helping actually solve it by managing the whole system,” she adds.

Additionally, their software offers long-lasting automation to control equipment and key processes based on real-time data. The software also includes a management module that automatically oversees daily operations.

Recurring revenues for DigitalPaani are generated from its software and software-powered services, and a one-time integration fee. 

The company is currently working with 50 facilities across 12 states in the country, including Tata, Reliance Leela Hotels and the Delhi Jal Board. As of last year, they closed at Rs 2.2 crore in revenue and are aiming higher this year, says Mansi.

On women in the sector

It’s rare to see women working in a field that involves installing and operating machinery, potentially in remote or industrial areas, or building infrastructure from the ground up, says Mansi. 

This, along with a high number of female dropouts in core engineering backgrounds and disproportionate enrollment numbers, makes it a challenge for women to enter the field.

“I would tell any woman entering this space to be prepared for these challenges. But water is an important issue that requires diverse perspectives, so the more women leaders emerge in this space, the more rounded the solutions that come up,” she advises.