Dream of a Navi Mumbai startup: Rs300 water purifier

Greenway Grameen Infra’s (GGI) six-member team is sweating it out on ramping up sales of its first product, a Rs950 metallic stove for villages. But that’s not keeping it from expanding GGI’s offerings. Among its ambitious products is a water purifier for Rs300.

“We don’t know if we’ll be able to produce it at $3 (Rs135), but that’s our target,” said Neha Juneja, who along with Ankit Mathur established GGI at CBD Belapur in Navi Mumbai a year ago.

Juneja added that GGI has been working with a large water purifier manufacturer, whose name Juneja refused to divulge, for the last eight months. “We are currently testing it in some villages in Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal and the response has been quite good,” Juneja, 26, said.

Mathur, who was with Juneja at the Delhi College of Engineering, said it will be a while before the purifier is launched. “Our next product will be a waste heat-to-electricity generator, which is in the R&D (research & development) stage and we want to consolidate our position in the stove market.” GGI is targeting a turnover of Rs2.5 crore this fiscal and Rs50 crore by 2014.

Explaining the idea behind the purifier, Juneja said the key for GGI is to create a water purifier that can be customised to sieve contaminants unique to a region. “For instance, there is arsenic in the water in some rural parts of West Bengal and mica in villages in MP.”

Marzin Shroff, chief executive, direct sales and senior vice-president, marketing, Eureka Forbes, concurred with her. “Any solution that is not tailor-made will make compromises because it may not be meant for that specific quality of water and may not address the different contaminants in the water,” he said. Eureka owns the Aquaguard brand.

But if it’s so cheap, is GGI’s product just a filter or a purifier? While a filter just removes visible impurities, a purifier sifts physical, chemical, viral and bacterial contaminants from the water.

“It’s a purifier. We have found out that the technology is not very expensive. But our water purifier has very little (purified) storage capacity. People in villages like to keep their water in matkas because they keep it cool and there are no faucets and running water in many places,” Juneja said.

If GGI’s plans come to fruition, its purifier will cost Rs200 less than Tata Chemicals’ Swach Smart Magic, also without a bottom container, which is not pushed through the regular sales channels and is provided on specific queries to non-governmental organisations (NGOs). “We analysed consumer habits and there is a preference towards a complete purifier with upper and lower containers,” said Sabaleel Nandy, head, water purifier business, Tata Chemicals.

Shroff echoed Nandy’s views. “Almost all purifiers in the organised segment come with a container for the purified water because there is no point to a purifier if there is no safe exit point.”
Shroff pegged the current number of purifier makers at 120-150 and size of the market at about ¤1,500 crore.

Tata Chemicals’ cheapest purifier (with a storage container), Swach Smart, is available for Rs899, Hindustan Unilever’s (HUL) Pureit Compact at Rs1,000 and Eureka’s AquaSure Xtra for Rs1,250.

Shroff said there are several things that need to be looked at in a low-cost purifier. “What level of impurities it removes, whether there is a chemical process of treatment and what standards and norms it conform to.”

He added that Eureka is working on bringing out cheaper purifiers than the ones in its portfolio, but for the hinterland, instead of introducing ‘cheap and often sub-standard’ products, Eureka installs rural water plants, where people can have their water purified for 12 paise a litre.

A HUL spokesperson said the company is currently doing pilots with regard to distribution of Pureit in rural markets both through Project Shakti, its rural distribution channel, and through some external agencies. “These pilots are in preliminary stages and hence we are not in a position to share specific plans at this stage,” he added.