Use Case # 8: Nonprofit – Smart village initiative

Use Case # 7: Municipal Water

March 25, 2019

Use Case # 9: Water Distribution

March 25, 2019

Use Case # 8: Nonprofit - Smart village initiative

Challenge

More than 70% of India lives in villages and many lives are lost due to lack of access to clean water. The health and hygiene are compromised due to unreliable access to low quality water. Shrimp farmers lack water metrics that directly impact yield that runs their business. About 20% of agricultural farmers rely entirely on rainfall to water their crops and 80% of farmers are dissatisfied with current irrigation solutions. In addition, water theft is a common problem, where people will cut pipes in order to access free water. Water tanks overflow because they aren’t monitored, which can exacerbate the water loss. Private and public filtration plants lack quality control enforcement or validation impacting the overall public health.

KETOS integration

As part of a Smart Village initiative in 2017 with UC Berkeley and Andhra Government, KETOS created the 1st 25 Smart Villages with Mori village being the 1st Digital village of India. The KETOS platform provided the village with actionable analytics with predictive insights on water distribution and safety. The solution generated net-new water metrics with early warnings, that didn't exist before through continuous monitoring of water quality parameters.

The KETOS Shield technology measured several water health parameters like pH, conductivity, turbidity, salinity, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, hardness, and several heavy metals to ensuring water quality.

The KETOS Wave technology measured the flow, pressure, leaks, level, and volume to manage water distribution properly.

Business Impact

KETOS implemented a collaborative business model for the rural population which made clean water readily available. The intent was to work on scaling this across the state for 36,000 villages to provide affordable and safe drinking water to every villager and empower them in the process of that transition. KETOS worked a few like-minded local NGOs to form a nonprofit coalition helped bring the best of technology. Besides training the local villagers to monitor, service and manage the deployments, the nonprofit trained women from these villages and provided them with skills necessary to be a competitive member of the workforce.