Hosted by ACT, UnHerd brings you the unheard stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt the social impact landscape. From social entrepreneurs to venture philanthropists, dive into real-world conversations on what they’ve experienced and learned about changing the status quo.
In our latest episode, we welcome Amrit Om Nayak (Co-Founder, Indra Water) who speaks with Sruthi Shanmugam (Manager, ACT For Environment) about leveraging technology to tackle India’s water crisis, collaborating with industry giants like Tata and Unilever, and unlocking new ways to make water treatment both economically and environmentally viable.
Listen to this episode on our Spotify channel or watch the conversation on YouTube.
Sruthi: Hello folks and welcome to the eighth episode of UnHerd, a podcast hosted by ACT that delves into the extraordinary stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt India’s social impact landscape.
Water, one of our planet’s most precious resources, is being pushed to the brink. Did you know that 54% of India is classified as water stressed? This means over half of our country is grappling with severe water scarcity, yet we often take this resource for granted. In fact, 74% of water and 81% of sewage in India goes untreated, with industries frequently releasing harmful forever-chemicals into water bodies, which is further complicating the challenge.
Our guest today is someone who is working tirelessly to address these challenges. Amrit, the co-founder of Indra Water, is leading the charge on wastewater treatment, developing a technology that not only reduces water wastage, but also tackles those difficult to remove forever-chemicals. Under Amrit’s leadership, Indra has saved over 2.5 billion litres of water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions significantly.
Amrit, welcome to UnHerd!
Amrit: Hi Sruthi, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It’s a real pleasure.
The spark that lit the fire: Creating the economic value of water
Sruthi: Amrit, let’s kick things off by diving into your journey. What inspired you to focus on water treatment? Was there a specific moment or challenge that made you realise this was the problem you wanted to solve?
Amrit: I think the inspiration to work on water goes long back, because I’ve grown up in the southern part of India, in the city of Chennai. When we used to wake up early in the morning, our daily activities used to be planned around the availability of water. It was so integral to everything we did. My co-founder, his father was into the chemicals trading business. So he had been to multiple factories and seen effluents or toxins being discharged untreated into freshwater bodies. So these vivid images from our childhood kind of stayed with us. We might have taken a different path in our academic careers and in our professional careers later, where I was into automotives followed by clean energy. Same thing with my co-founder.
But we got this opportunity to treat stormwater in Seattle. We were roommates there, we were doing our masters at the University of Washington in Seattle. And we asked ourselves that if we could recover this water using our skills in energy, that we have learned over these years, can we extend it to really bad quality toxins and dirty water? So that was the trigger point for us that got us closer to water and we felt that we could do much more than just discuss it.
Sruthi: Your solution specifically works with forever chemicals. How have you managed this specific challenge?
Amrit: See, we are an electrically driven solution unlike many others who rely predominantly on biology or chemical usage. Now, being electrically driven allows us to do multiple reactions at the same time. We could be coagulating suspended particles inside. We could be oxidising pollutants through multiple pathways which means we could be breaking them down by pulling away their electrons. The ability to be able to modulate that as water flows through your system holds us in great stead to be able to tackle very difficult toxins.
Now, these are carbon fluorine bonds and these are very strong generally. So if you’re able to supply the right kind of potential and make the right kind of energy available, you could pull away the electron that holds that bond together and that has helped us become very effective. So the understanding of what is the right energy utilisation for treating different water, better process control, and of course, the innovations that we have unlocked with micro-electrolysis – we call it Electrox – these have kind of helped us unlock more value in these segments, enabling water which is safer for even human consumption.
Sruthi: Out of curiosity, in your installations, is the water used within the industries itself or are they then being distributed to water bodies where they then get accumulated and improve the water tables?
Amrit: The first step is the use within the industry. Water body cleaning and reclamation – these are activities where at least today, economic value cannot be quantified to a great extent. Who is it actually benefiting, apart from the environmental footprint? But when you are talking about industrial process reuse, there is a clear economic value which can be quantified.
So it has got to start with this and it’s already happening. A lot of players in North India, Western parts of India and Southern India are already doing it and Eastern part of India will also join in because they are the bulk users when it comes to mining industry, steel industry and all that, where there can be huge impact.
Once we enter into that phase, where industrial process reuse has become mainstream, that’s when you have more water available for domestic use cases and sewage treatment. So industry comes first, because there is a business continuity case here, there is an economic value case here, followed by sewage treatment. Because if you are going to tap all the pollutants and ensure that the water is not going out, your water bodies are anyway going to start becoming better.
Sruthi: I think you’ve had tremendous success working with marquee clients like Unilever and Tata and your technology has been implemented in various industries, right? Could you share a story or an example of how your solution has created real impact for your clients?
Amrit: I think one of the interesting parts of our journey is the first five years, where we were actually working with much smaller clients. Companies which have a much smaller balance sheet and where the requirement for water was much lower. And these customers were textile customers, they were customers in the food production area, they were customers in the pharmaceutical area. Now, working with these customers actually helped us understand that our product could be deployed either standalone, it could be combined with existing technologies, and more importantly even customer personnel – people at the ground level there could be trained to work with us and respond to different situations with our deployed water assets. Now that builds a certain kind of confidence not just in the product but also builds a confidence in our ability to control the performance of assets over a period of time.
Now, there is a very unique use case with a textile customer and it’s a garment washing facility. We have been doing a very tricky wastewater [intervention] which has a lot of surfactants. Now at this facility, we have managed to recover almost every drop of water for reuse. It has either been used in industrial processes or it has been used for other non-portable activities like flushing or irrigation or even floor washing. So not a single drop of water is actually being wasted at that facility. And all this has been achieved with the help of the customer where they have also risen up to the challenge and worked with us.
Our end customers include the likes of Unilever, Tata, and the Aditya Birla Group. All of these customers are important from the perspective of a recurring pattern of requirement across their businesses. So for Indra, progressing from these smaller customers to the larger ones has been very natural. And it has also helped build successful use cases, which can be applied to these larger use cases.
First principle lens: The role of water treatment in business continuity
Sruthi: Thank you for sharing that story, Amrit. Water is a very complex space, right? Especially water treatment. And again, with industrial waste water, it unfortunately doesn’t have a direct economic value attached to it. Can you talk us through how you’ve tackled this mindset, how have you created adoption for your solutions in an environment where water is often undervalued?
Amrit: So I agree with you Sruthi. Water as a resource has been extremely undervalued and we have taken it for granted. We do not associate a monetary value with it because we get it almost for free most of the time. But it is critical to understand that water is not just important for our daily activities but it’s important for business continuity.
A lot of the critical products that we use in our daily [lives] consume huge quantities of water [to manufacture]. So it was first important to understand that any disruption to water availability could impact businesses by not allowing them to continue production. The other part to understand is the economic value of water. Like, what if water is not available? What’s a value that can be attached to the downtime of your factory? Is there a value that can be attached to non-compliance or is there a value that can be attached to having to purchase more water at a higher cost? I think we are at a crossroads today where all of these questions have become really pertinent. It was important for us to go to our customers and help them understand that this is not just an activity you’re doing for the environment, nor is it just for compliance, but it actually makes business sense.
To use water and then treat it and reuse it at the point of source is actually an economically viable activity which can result in tremendous savings. It can also help them reduce the dependence on a centralised resource. Over a period of time, our customers have really come to see it. We have been able to demonstrate it with pilots and then with commercial systems. And the acceptance rate has significantly gone up. And we intend to continue on this path where we are going to spread more awareness. We are going to help them reuse more water and more importantly we are going to help them understand that industrial water does not need the highest quality fresh water. It could be done with treated water and freshwater should be left for human consumption, which is essential for life.
There are also a few new standards which have kicked in, which talk about minimum reuse for bulk users. The government has recently mandated that bulk users need to reuse at least 50% of the water. So that helps, because then they’re talking about offsetting freshwater demand and also reducing water pollution downstream because there aren’t enough centralised facilities which can deal with that. Further, there are policies around what is the minimum water generated by your facility versus the sewage treatment plant that you need to put up. So the government mandates that if you are generating more than a certain quantity of wastewater you compulsorily need to have that. So these things are egging people along and the compliance is becoming stronger.
But what we lack in India, is differential pricing. Today water is priced only on volume. Somebody like a textile plant which has about 10x lower pollutant load but generates 10x higher volume of water is charged higher than a pharmaceutical company which generates a very small quantity but with a very highly concentrated polluted load. So people should be charged on the basis of a volume slag based on consumption and they should be charged on the difficulty in treatment based on the pollutants or toxins that they are generating.
Sruthi: Do you think the policy landscape is taking that turn right now? Do you see any early emerging trends toward that or is it more in the long future and not the near future?
Amrit: I think the first steps have already been taken where the National Green Tribunal has already made the draft norms of water discharge significantly tighter and stricter compared to before. That is the first good step. And there have been regulations like the water reuse policy for bulk users or looking at how a CETP (Common Effluent Treatment Plant) should be designed. So certain steps are being taken.
I think it’s also related to the maturity of the water market. As the maturity of the market improves and adoption keeps going up, there’s going to be better economies of scale. The financials are going to make more sense and the cost of water is going to get better regulated along. In fact, there are a lot of facilities which are generating excess water after treatment, but they are unable to uptake it. So probably there could be a water exchange in urban areas where they are able to sell this water which could be easily used by industries in the industrial zones. They don’t need to use municipal fresh water for that. So this is another area which can come in, because we are looking at very large volumes of water in India.
Sruthi: Amrit, I know one exciting development we’ve heard and also supported is the launch of your upgraded technology, which is Electrox. It promises better efficiency and lower operational costs. Can you tell us what’s new with this version and how it’s going to take water treatment to the next level for you?
Amrit: Yeah, first of all, a big thank you to ACT for supporting the development of Electrox. It’s a massive upgrade over our previous reactor technology. And what really changes here is that we’ve been able to increase the amount of active oxidation sites, which is technically the amount of treatment sites available inside the reactor by 10X. Now, this automatically allows our reactors to treat water far more quickly than before. In fact, we’re able to treat sewage water in just 40 seconds of contact time in the reactor. Now that’s 25% faster from our previous generation reactors and our energy consumption has reduced by more than 15%, and in some cases, we’re able to actually see up to 30% reduction in energy consumption when we’re deploying it in commercial sites. Now all of this is possible because it’s not just been an iterative improvement, but it’s been a complete overhaul, keeping in mind the customer requirements in India. We encounter hybrid wastewater most of the time in India. So it was important for our reactors, our algorithms, our power supply systems to be able to respond quickly enough to these changing variable loads that come in. And the ability to have more treatment sites increases the probability of pollutants breaking down inside our reactor.
So, this overall jump from our previous generation flow series and structural flash reactors to Electrox has allowed us to do much larger projects. In fact, we were earlier doing ~2-3 million litres per day projects and now we are able to target and actually deploy systems in the ~30 million litres per day category. So that’s a 10x jump in our ability to deploy systems at scale. And all this has come, while saving more [carbon] footprint. When we were small, we were saving about 70 to 80% [carbon] footprint compared to others. Now we are saving almost 90% [carbon] footprint compared to others. So you’re saving space, you’re able to consume less energy, and you’re treating water faster, and you’re generating less solid waste compared to before, you’re almost generating 23% less of solid waste. So all of this is translating into economic benefits for the customer. But one of the critical things here is that it’s not just improving the lives of our customers, it’s improved our own lives as well. We are making far fewer interventions with our system. Our operators do not require very high skill sets, nor do they require any critical assets for making interventions with the system.
So it’s become much easier now to work with extended partners as well for deployment of our systems. So overall it has impacted our scalability and the timelines over which the scalability could play out.
Sruthi: Absolutely, I think one with the technology, you’re also saying time is of the essence and it fastens the process, but also it’s a huge cost benefit analysis for enabling adoption, at the same time creating massive impact, right? So very impressive, really excited to hear about Electrox and how it can scale. I just wanted to maybe shift gears a little – huge, huge congratulations on your recent fundraise. Could you share how this funding will help the larger vision for Indra? Where do you see the company heading, both from a business growth perspective and in terms of the impact Indra can actually achieve?
Amrit: Thank you so much about that. We did raise our Series A in January of this year. It was led by Emerald Technology Ventures and co-led by Mela Ventures and we had participation from Peak Sustainability Ventures who have been long time backers of our work, as well as Climate Angels and a few existing investors who reinvested. Of course, existing investors reinvesting is always a good thing because it shows that they continue to have the same kind of confidence in the company. For us, it is a watershed moment. In fact, internally, we call it kind of like the Henry Ford moment of, you know, water where we believe that we are creating a new framework where water systems can be built at scale. It’s no longer important to customise every system. It’s not really important to build every system from scratch. What is important is to shift this complication away from hardware, so the things can be scaled.
We had deployed just 5,75,000 litres worth of treatment systems, daily treatment systems, in the first five years of our growth. And in a year after that, we deployed 37,80,000 litres worth of treatment capacity. And now, the next three months, we’re deploying another 48,000,000 worth of treatment capacity with our different customers. So this calls for a very different kind of strategy with regards to our ability to produce more in terms of the reactors and the critical components, our ability to provide our electrodes which are consumable to our customers at scale, even capacities for training and processing more of the client sample water because Indra doesn’t really believe in going blind.
We have a process in place where we allow our customers to use our pilots as trial systems. And our pilots use the same reactors as the ones that are used in our commercial systems. So what you get in a pilot is very close and reflects the true performance that you could get with a real commercial system at play. So with all of these factors, we’re trying to upgrade our capacities here, get in more team members, get better training modules in place.
We’ve been also focusing a lot on the partnership program, where we’re working a lot more with larger water players and EPC contractors or technology integrators and providing them training to be able to deploy our assets in multiple process schematics. So, this focus on scale for the next two, three years is going to be there. And we anticipate that this is also going to be helping us across other geographical regions.
Traversing tough roads: Changing behavioural mindsets towards water security
Sruthi: What were the challenges you overcame in your founder journey, even in the first two, three years? What were the challenges that would have almost had you say, okay, I’m dropping this now, but you didn’t?
Amrit: I think the challenges were a lot about the mindset. Because water has been a commodity that’s been available at such an underpriced value. It’s been about why should we pay for our water, and more importantly why should we pay to clean it up? So that was a big challenge we had to work on, because we had to prove to people that it can actually be economically viable to clean up a resource which is so underpriced.
I think the other challenge was that the water industry is so fragmented and at such a nascent state, though it has been existing for over 100 years now, but the actual development of technology, actual development of financing models, or the industry itself in terms of maturity and execution, all of these are not at the same level of maturity as some of the other industries like automobile industry or manufacturing industry for that matter.
And it was important for us to help our customers understand that not every water plant has to be designed from scratch. It is possible to have a modular approach to water treatment as well. In fact, some of our customers earlier would not believe that you could segregate streams and have a small module taking care of one stream and another taking care of the other polluted stream and then you could combine it. That kind of flexibility to treat different streams differently and have different mixes of treated water. It could not, one could not think about it earlier.
Sruthi: I do want more words of wisdom from you as a founder that we can pass on to our listeners. Building a tech-driven solution in a critical sector like water is no easy feat. What advice would you give, especially when it comes to scaling, securing adoption for innovation?
Amrit: I think it’s very important to realise that if you’re solving a tech problem and it unlocks great value for your customers, especially in the B2B space, it’s important to create use cases and that calls for restraint. It’s a general mindset that we scale very quickly the moment we build something. But if you’re in the infrastructure space, it can really backfire on you. So what’s important is to take time, perfect your product, get it as close as possible to where you really want it to be. It’s not going to be perfect, but then you need to get it out there to customers, especially smaller use cases. It’s always better to start small. Get the feedback and make it a part of a natural product development cycle that you’ve built a POC, you’re able to test it at the customer side, get their feedback in. So what you build ultimately is going to be what the customer is asking for. It’s never about us wanting to build something and then trying to convince a customer that they need it. Demand has to be organic and we need to respect that. So that’s one of the things that we forget in our quest to scale very quickly.
For deep tech companies or companies working on hardware, it’s really important to go through this life cycle, really understand the market dynamics, understand what are the value adds, where do you position yourself? Understand your unit economics really, really well. Because since you’re doing R&D and you’re making mistakes and you’re also spending money on projects, it can all go wrong very quickly. So it’s critical to understand these aspects of your business before you walk up to a venture capitalist to ask for money.
Future Forward: Indra Water at 2030
Sruthi: What is the vision for Indra Water maybe at 2030 or 2050?
Amrit: As we get closer to 2030, we want to be able to treat that much water each day. That’s the kind of impact we want to make. We want to impact the lives of more than 500,000 people positively each day and not just over five or six years. And for that, scale is so critical. The other aspect that we’re really looking to do is that we want to drive the sector itself towards more maturity. Maturity in product offerings, maturity in how we improve the lives of operators on the ground and what kind of tools we make available. It’s important to upskill people in the water sector.
So we want to create a framework where something like that is possible, where water quality is being monitored, decisions are better, there is preventive maintenance in play, reduce downtime, and make the life of an operator simpler so that they can upskill further and probably progress in their life. And the last part of the impact is we want to get to really high quality purified water while conserving more energy.
In India, I think we generate about 72,300 million litres of sewage per day and we generate almost 13,000 million litres of industrial effluents per day. So that is a massive quantity. And even with the work that we’re doing in Indra, we’re not even scratching the surface with that. So [I think] it is important for a lot of innovators to come together, collaborate, and build solutions at scale by supporting each other. So we really look forward to collaborating with people who come up with new ideas.
Sruthi: Thank you so much, Amrit. This has been such a fascinating conversation. The work you and your team are doing at Indra Water is just not solving an environmental problem, but you’re also reshaping how we value and protect one of our most essential resources.
Amrit: Thank you so much, Sruthi.
Sruthi: This brings us to the end of our eighth episode of UnHerd – a podcast presented by team ACT. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channels, where we’ll bring you more unheard stories of people who are passionate about creating impact at scale in different ways. People who truly stand apart from the herd.
