MANISH GUPTA
Ranchi, Aug 11: The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has shortlisted city-based startup Bhungru to address challenges in the urban water sector and has paired it with Jamshedpur for testing its solution before being scaled up and replicated.
“Bhungru is one of the 76 startups selected from across India under a startup challenge by the ministry. Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) is the key technical partner to the ministry for this,” said Sayan Mondal, Senior Research Associate, ASCI.
The ministry had launched ‘India Water Pitch-Pilot-Scale Start-up Challenge’ to identify 100 startups to provide workable and scalable solutions for the urban water problems. A total of 202 applications were received from which the ASCI ranked the startups.
“Bhungru has been working in the very important area of ground water recharge. They base their work on deep scientific research and do things vigorously. They are mapped with Jamshedpur city for testing and demonstrating their solution,” Mondal said.
The startups were evaluated on various parameters namely innovation, usability, relevance to the subject matter, impact on society, replicability, scalability, ease of deployment/ rollout, potential risks involved and completeness of the proposal.
The ministry has asked the Chief Secretaries of all the states to appoint nodal officers in cities that are mapped with the startups to coordinate with them. A matchmaking task was done between the requirements of a city and the solutions of the startups.
“We are happy to be selected for the challenge. Bhungru plays a major role in improving ground water level. Each unit of Bhungru can preserve one million to five million litres of rain water each year within sub-surface zones of earth for domestic, agricultural and industrial uses during dry periods,” said Bhungru Director Rathin Bhadra.
The rapid urbanisation and deforestation have considerably reduced the groundwater recharge in many parts of the world, Bhadra said. This will have serious implications for the sustainability of agriculture, food security, livelihoods and economic growth, he said.
All the selected startups will be given a grant amounting to a maximum of Rs 20 lakh in three tranches of Rs 5 lakh, Rs 7 lakh and Rs 8 lakh on reaching the milestones of work as per their project proposal and approval of a monitoring and evaluation agency.
The India water startup challenge, organised under the ‘Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation 2.0’, has happened for the first time in the country. However, sources inform that the ministry is considering making it an annual challenge.
AMRUT 2.0 aims to provide universal coverage of water supply through functional taps to all households in all the statutory towns in the country and coverage of sewerage/ septage management in 500 cities covered in the first phase of the AMRUT scheme.
