Mansi Jain

Updated March 2024

India’s broken private wastewater treatment system worsens a dire water crisis

India faces a growing water crisis: 80 percent of water sources are polluted by untreated sewage, making clean, safe water an increasingly scarce commodity. “There are many, many cities that have actually run out of groundwater already,” notes DigitalPaani founder and CEO Mansi Jain.

The government requires commercial buildings and industries to treat their own wastewater, but 75 percent of the 85,000 private water treatment plants in India don’t work properly—or at all—because of the lack of expertise and systems needed to run them, as well as frequent equipment breakdowns.

“Building owners spend up to US$500,000 every year trying to operate these facilities,” Mansi says. But because they’re not working correctly, the units guzzle fresh water even as they’re contaminating local water sources with untreated sewage, increasing the risk of disease. “This also has a significant climate impact, because pumping water unnecessarily uses a lot of energy.”

Digital Paani improves treatment plant performance with technology

Water conservation is part of Mansi’s DNA. Her father, an environmental engineer, has deep industry expertise. Childhood dinner-table conversations often centered around climate change, which led Mansi to a career in sustainability. She and her father decided to explore how technology could help building owners improve their wastewater treatment plants, reducing both pollution and costs, and DigitalPaani was born (the word “paani” means “water” in Hindi).

“I realized that this is something only technology can solve,” Mansi says. “It’s the only way to scale expertise when systems are decentralized.”

DigitalPaani brings underperforming treatment plants back online with a software platform that manages their entire operations. “We’re not just monitoring data or providing analytics,” Mansi says. “We’re integrating and synchronizing everything involved in the operations of a treatment plant, from the equipment and human operators to chemical inventories and maintenance.”

A new model of wastewater management aims to shift the world’s approach to water

In 2022, customers using DigitalPaani to manage treatment plants reduced daily fresh water consumption by about 2.1 million liters while preventing nearly 1.4 million liters of untreated sewage from entering water supplies.

“Building owners can now stay in compliance with the legal requirements for wastewater treatment,” Mansi explains. “Some of our customers have saved up to 30 percent on their annual operating costs.”

DigitalPaani estimates that by reducing treatment energy consumption, pumping less fresh water, and replacing equipment less often, customers offset more than 3,300 kilograms of CO2 —the equivalent of 55,000 mature trees—and shrank annual operating costs 25 to 35 percent in 2022.

“We want to showcase a new model of water management in other emerging markets, as well as in developed economies where there are increasing water challenges. We want to spark something broader in the ecosystem beyond us and have an impact on the world’s approach to water.”