Andhra Pradesh, India and California, USA
Product description: WaterPurification
Year founded 2003
Up to 2 billion people in the world are without access to safe drinkable water and the situation is getting worse, says Sanjay Bhatnagar, chief executive officer of WaterHealth. Flooding in Pakistan and other countries exacerbated the problem in those areas this summer. But there are also underlying political and industrial causes. "Governments are running out of resources to deal with this problem," Bhatnagar says. "A lot of them have simply given up. They leave the people to their own devices."
So households and villages are improvising – often boiling water, sometimes buying purification devices and even digging bore holes. But finding clean water is hit and miss. In Ghana, 70% of illnesses relate to waterborne parasites, says WaterHealth. In India, where WaterHealth has set up 300 community water centres since 2005, sickness due to unclean water is a way of life for many.
A doctor who wrote to the company when a water centre was set up in his area, said: "I am going to ask everyone to drink this water so they can become healthy and reduce waterborne disease incidents … Missing two to three days of work every month due to illness caused by waterborne diseases also means missing pay on those days. That is something none of us can afford to have happen."
Bhatnagar, an engineer-turned-businessman, thinks that private enterprises such as WaterHealth could provide much of the answer. "Our goal is to show that this problem can be solved by a public-private partnership. People have never applied the right kind of business model." WaterHealth raises its money by commercial loans and invests in purification centres on portable platforms (costing £13,000 to £23,000 each), in both urban and rural areas. The communities typically foot 40% of that cost, and WaterHealth funds the rest. Once up and running, a process which takes three weeks, the centre is maintained by WaterHealth which charges for the water purification. In India, it costs 4 rupees (about 5p) for 20 litres. That is about 1 per cent of what it costs to buy bottled water.
Governments working alone may not be able to solve these issues in rich states as well. As we know in the UK, the state finds it expensive to maintain the huge infrastructure needed to provide clean water from house to house. We are still using over-loaded Victorian pipes and sewerage systems. "Our water supplies are under attack by industry, pharmaceuticals and waste disposal," says Bhatnagar. Access to safe water is not just a problem of the developing world.