Learn How Akamai Enables AI Powered Analytics Tools to Reduce Water Losses
The Accelerator Program, a flagship initiative of Akamai India’s Corporate Social Responsibility Trust, enables early-stage innovations for water conservation. Over the past two years, along with our mentoring partner, the International Center for Clean Water (ICCW; an initiative of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras), we onboarded two social innovators as Cohort 1 grantees: Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment and Foundation for Environmental Monitoring, and two social innovators as Cohort 2 grantees, SmartTerra and Jaljeevika. All of them started with a proof of concept and underwent an in-depth screening and intensive bootcamp as part of the selection process. The bootcamp was based on lean startup methodology, and was conducted to gauge the investment readiness level of participants. The bootcamp provided tools to validate their business and mission models. On this World Water Monitoring Day, we are highlighting the work of the social innovator SmartTerra. SmartTerra is a Bengaluru-based water-technology startup, helping cities use AI-powered analytics tools to reduce water losses and improve access to water for all.
ICCW is helping SmartTerra discover customer needs, identify customer segments, and define and implement the Minimum Viable Product pilot project.
NITI Aayog, a public policy think tank of the Indian government, estimates that by 2030 the domestic demand for water in India will be twice the available supply and cities will become hotspots of water scarcity. Nevertheless, urban water utilities in India lose about 25% of the water they produce in distribution because of leaking pipes, metering error, and theft. Given the size and complexity of water networks, it is extremely difficult and expensive to proactively identify such issues and reduce water losses. SmartTerra is developing the AI-powered analytics tools MeterCity and NetCity (see Figures 1 and 2) to provide help to water utilities in order to locate leaky pipes and faulty meters. Owing to their modular designs, MeterCity and NetCity can be deployed even in small towns with limited data. They are engineered to work with data that is already available via current utilities and will not require additional hardware. As cloud hosted software as a service products, they can be easily deployed in cities without the need for data infrastructure and can be scaled quickly.
“The Akamai Accelerator Program has significantly enabled us in our outreach to the urban water utility sector in India and to conduct MVP testing of our products,” says SmartTerra Co-founder and VP, Giridharan Sengaiah.
Fig. 1: MeterCity: Task manager with rich visualization of anomalous connections
Fig. 2: NetCity: Likelihood of failure map of the water pipe network
With its commitment to water conservation, Akamai strongly believes that the only way to bring change is to lead by example. We are deeply dedicated to our mission statement to make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day. The launch of Cohort 3 will enable more social innovators to create smart technological solutions to address water problems in India, underscoring Akamai’s action-based philosophy.
