Most Indian cities are both blessed and challenged with this affordable zero-carbon water source. This water source is the almost 50% of water that is produced by Indian cities but is lost before it reaches the consumer.
About 30% of urban households in gated societies have the luxury of 24/7 water supply and RO filters safeguarding their health but the rest of urban India relies on the city to supply them clean and affordable water. Even gated societies themselves are reliant on municipal water as a primary source. Municipal water access is not just an urban livability issue but urgently needs to be seen in a climate and emissions context.
Let’s consider Bengaluru as an example. Bengaluru’s water supply Board pumps in water from reservoirs near the Cauvery river, from about 80KM away. Once the water gets to the city, it goes through chemical treatment plants before being pumped into a massive water distribution network of 9000 KMs to reach 1M households and businesses. Bengaluru’s daily Cauvery water production of 1400 Million Liters would consume approximately 140 MWh, equivalent to 105 Metric Tonnes of CO2 emissions.
In Bengaluru, out of the 1400 ML pumped into the distribution network only 50% of it reaches the customer. Recovering most of the 50% losses would nearly double the water availability at the customer end, with no additional energy used and no additional greenhouse gasses emitted.
So, why do Indian cities have such huge water losses? And how can just data analytics help recover these losses?
Central schemes such as AMRUT, Smart Cities Mission and Jal Jeevan Mission are propelling the expansion and digitization of Indian water utilities. What is not being addressed is the management challenge - the complex scale of city networks, lack of dedicated operational expertise, networks designed for 24/7 supply but being operated in an intermittent supply mode, etc.
Hardware for monitoring, automating and controlling the water networks are getting commoditized and affordable. But for the utility manager, the hardware alerts only add to the deluge of customer complaints. Detecting and diagnosing pipe bursts or leaks, prioritizing the lossy pipes within the thousands of kilometers of network becomes overwhelming.
Cities are increasingly getting metered at the household level. And within the lakhs of households, there will be ones who have tampered or disconnected their meter, or households where the meter is either not read or has stopped working. Finding out the unmetered or illegal usage of water becomes as difficult as finding a needle in the haystack.
Fixing an individual pipe or replacing a meter is a simple task. But when network leaks and tampered connections are allowed to fester and build up over the years, losses start becoming overwhelmingly huge. The water networks are underground in the literal sense and also in the mindspace of a municipal manager: out of sight is indeed out of mind.
City utilities are extremely underserved in terms of technology solutions to aid operational management. The missing piece, as illustrated above, is an analytics solution which works across data silos and unifies utility expertise, sensor analytics, hydraulics and geospatial expertise, etc to pinpoint losses. Ideally, the solution should also provide a post-analytics task workflow to enable managerial follow up on in-the-field investigations and fixes.
How would this data-driven intelligence look like in the utility’s day to day operations?
Existing utilities networks, undergoing expansion or rehabilitation, need a bunch of pipes to be replaced within an available budget. City utility managers could prioritize only parts of the network that have a high likelihood of failure by analyzing the past maintenance history and customer complaints along with the network’s environmental stresses.
The utility manager can also proactively identify failing pipes before leaks or bursts actually develop.
In cities where customers have been metered and supply monitoring has been installed, city utility managers can be aided by a real-time bird’s-eye view and diagnosis of the lossy pipes. Operational staff can focus on tens of kilometers of pipe instead of thousands of kilometers.
On the demand side, utility managers need to ensure customer consumption is being properly measured, ensure consumption is being equitably satisfied across the city and monitor for any illegal usage or theft. They would need analysis at the meter or household level while also analyzing across socio-economic and spatial cohorts.
Why do we need this NOW?
With the ongoing water network expansion and privatization going on in India, every city utility, whether one of the 6 mega-cities or one of the 200 Tier-1/Tier-2 cities, will require such decision-support solutions to ensure long-term efficiency and sustainability of the new infrastructure.
Water production and distribution is an energy-intensive large-scale industrial process and for many Indian cities, water and wastewater handling is the largest municipal consumer of electricity, typically accounting for a third of total electricity consumed.
Orgs such as the World Bank and NITI Aayog estimate that by 2030, India will face a 50% shortfall in water supply equating to hundreds of millions of people facing severe water scarcity. And result in about a 6% loss in the country’s GDP by 2050.
Fixing water losses, at both the network and customer ends, positively impacts water availability for consumers, improves the city’s productivity, reduces energy spend, reduces the emissions footprint and eases upstream pressure on water sources and watershed ecosystems.
Our city. Our commons. Our responsibility.
We have leap-frogged our way to pervasive digital payments and 10-min groceries. It is time for a homegrown Utility Stack, a la India Stack, to revolutionize the way Indian cities run their utilities. And it is not just an India problem, the World Bank estimates that as a global average, 30% of the world’s piped water is lost before it reaches the customer.
At SmartTerra, we have embarked on such a journey, putting AI/ML to work for Indian water utilities, undeterred by the chaos and data-unreliability of a typical Indian city utility, and have demonstrated quantified benefits while working with infrastructure giants such as SUEZ and L&T in 6 cities in India.
Drop us a message at [email protected] or if you are in Bengaluru, drop by at HSR Layout! Would love to connect.
References:
- NITI Aayog. 2019. Composite Water Management Index.
- How is India addressing its water needs? World Bank. Accessed 24 August 2022
- Embodied energy comparison of surface water and groundwater supply options. Weiwei Moa, Qiong Zhanga, James R.Mihelcica, David R.Hokansonb. University of Florida, November 2011
- The Carbon Footprint of Tap Water Is a Lot Higher Than You Think, Lloyd Alter, Treehugger, June 2, 2021
- US Environmental Protection Agency, Greenhouse Gases Equivalencies Calculator. Greenhouse Gases Equivalencies Calculator - Calculations and References | US EPA
