Imagining a societal scale water solution

28 Dec, 2022 . 5 mins read

Water anywhere straight to where it is needed

Bhisma drinking water of Patala Ganga which was drawn on earth by Arjuna (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A forwarded message on whatsapp: a mythological character in a critical scene: the warrior lying on a bed of arrows, thirsty, and the Hero using his magical arrow brings the river Ganga right there, with the Parjanyastra , a magical arrow that brings rain. In this version though, the water did not come out from the ground — the earth was dry and the missile couldn’t work!

There is something larger being conveyed here by this whatsapp forward, but the audience is still looking for the Parjanyastra, to solve their water problem.

If it is a new smart bottle that cleans all kinds of dirty water, or another one that can convert air into water, we hear of something every day that claims to be the next magical water solution at a societal scale.

In INREM, we thought differently. Back in 2015, when we started hearing of a societal approach to problems, little did we imagine what we would be doing today in 2022. But that’s true always: back from 2030, we will still be wondering what we were thinking in 2022. Hence this article to help us remember.

We had played around with our Parjanyastra and realised that such focused products are very much needed. They are useful for solving one problem. But that gives rise to another. For example, from 2010, we were innovating on having a robust and easy to use fluoride removal filter for tribal areas. While we made progress with it, larger questions came forward — how do people sustain it themselves, what about its harmful chemical release, how do we scale it more.

Fast forward again to 2015: more we spoke with people across India, we felt that the shortage is not of solutions that work. There are a lot of them. Somewhere a village had realised that Arsenic was a problem and found a way of using their village pond water and clean it for drinking. Somewhere a coastal village had together come about to have abstinence as a means of keeping borewells from becoming too deep and letting saline water in.

Everywhere we went, we saw solutions and people talking about. The question for us really was: Are they talking with each other?

The problem lay somewhere else. First, a little bit on our mission — INREM works on getting attention to the quality of water, because we believe that the value of water is only as much as its quality. The problem is not of having some water, it is about having the right kind of water, when we need it.

When the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) in India was brewing a few years back, talk on quality water reaching every household started growing. We started getting a lot of requests of helping people out with it. One approach we felt could be to think simply — lets offer services to anyone who needs our help.

But our experience told us something else. When the answer actually lay out there, why should we bother? The question is whether people are ready to listen to each other. Do they have a common language for this? Is there a means that they can find each other and very importantly, have a context.

This is when, in 2020, INREM started its work on enabling anyone anywhere to have an ability to solve problems of Water quality at their scale. So what did it mean. For us, it meant that first, everyone needs a foundational understanding, and a common language. But beyond that, a means to grow, to connect and share with each other.

All this led to our mission of #WaterQualityChampions.

The Parjanyastra solutions out there are in people’s minds. They also develop when people talk with each other. But first let us have a common language. With this in mind, we started a 1 month cohort of 100–200 #WaterQualityChampions from August 2021 called the Water Quality Management (WQM) course. Neatly divided into 22 small modules, and engagement routines in English and Hindi, this course discovers trainers from participants, and feeds them back into the course.

This way, we entered the 11th month in June 2022, reaching 1200 participants in 300+ districts across all states and UTs of India. The societal nature of #WaterQualityChampions is in the belief that within each person is an expert in something. Question is how does that expertise come to use for someone else in need. Entering the 35th weekly Guided mentoring interaction now, we find that this space of interconnection between seekers and givers of actionable-knowledge is something to be discovered more and grown.

Some examples here: A startup innovator from Bangalore from Batch 2 grows into a trainer for the module of Digital water platform in English, 5 successive times. A Jal Sahayak from Garhwa, Jharkhand finds her answer to Chuna (limestone) in water from a GM session in which the expert is an engineer from Odisha. A JJM district IEC team lead from Rajsamand, Chhattisgarh turns into a trainer, helper for other practitioners and a month-running top-10 Champions League leaderboard (a motivational gamification appreciating the efforts of #WaterQualityChampions).

As engineers, activists, village water workers and journalists meet together and realise their common potential, we step back as INREM. In this societal space, we feel that the energy is higher when we retreat. When the voices of individuals are amplified and heard, the problems start to get seen.

Coming back to the Parjanyastra, we find that is no longer been sought for. People are seeking each other. INREM is helping amplify this search in a meaningful way with common languages that are constantly being evolved, and a societal scale water solution getting formed over time.