New Delhi, Years after moving from his hometown in Bihar’s Madhubani to Mumbai’s slums in search of a better life, a 20-year-old found his community facing another struggle – wastewater pooling around homes and increasing exposure to waterborne diseases such as dengue, malaria and typhoid, conditions that eventually prompted him to explore an innovation aimed at addressing the problem.
Twenty-year-old Piyush Jha has developed a decentralised, modular wastewater treatment system designed to make treatment more practical and affordable, initially targeting the industrial sector – an innovation that has been recognised by the United Nations Development Programme in India through its entrepreneurship programme ‘Youth Co:Lab National Innovation Challenge’. “We don’t require any chemical dosing to treat wastewater, nor do we require heavy civil infrastructure.
The current water treatment plants require heavy civil infrastructure just to get started, which is a major concern for manufacturing and processing plants in India,” he said. Asked about the scope of the project, Jha said it indirectly impacts the common person by providing industries an affordable water treatment solution.
“When small and medium-scale industries get an affordable water treatment solution, they’re less likely to discharge toxic wastewater into water bodies. It also helps them financially. These include Indra Water, a Mumbai-based Indian cleantech startup that designs compact, decentralised wastewater treatment systems, and Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwale, a sweets and snacks enterprise based in Pune. He also received a conditional purchase order from Dahej Waste Service, a Bharuch, Gujarat-based provider of commercial and industrial cleaning and waste management services. “I don’t have any formal degree in water treatment engineering. I’m the first in my family to start a company, since we come from a lower-middle-class background where even landing a job at a big firm is considered a huge dream.
An industry may earlier spend ₹ 20 lakh on operational costs for water treatment, which our pretreatment solution reduces to ₹ 5 to 7 lakh,” he told PTI. I left my college, DG Sanghvi College in Mumbai, where I’d scored 98 percentiles in MHT-CET, to go all in on this startup,” Jha told PTI.
