Affordable safe drinking water
Spring Health provides safe drinking water is 250 + villages in Odisha in Eastern India and has expanded to Jharkhand a neighboring state. Water is delivered daily to 30,000 households* to 150,000 individuals. *numbers fluctuate now during the covid19 pandemic because of rolling lockdowns
Water is delivered at INR 5 or 7 for 10-liter jars of water or INR 15 for 20-liter jars at the home. This includes the cost of delivery. This works out to USD 0.006 to USD 0.01 per liter delivered at home. The price of delivery is entirely retained by the delivery men and women.
SPRING HEALTH’s CONTRIBUTIONS
More poor households have access to clean drinking water
The project helps reduce diseases related to unsafe drinking water and air pollution from boiling it
Information campaigns and street theater help educate people about health risks from unsafe drinking water
This project ensures access to safe drinking water in rural areas of India
The project has created 750 jobs for engineers, scientists, project managers, chlorine production, and in water sale and distribution
Safe drinking water is made accessible for poorer families
Families avoid carbon emissions from boiling their drinking water and they need less wood or coal which protects local forests from deforestation
Spring Health is generating Gold Standard Verified Emission Reductions (VERs)
Creates Local employment
Through a decentralized hub and spoke model, Spring Health creates 2 to 6 part time jobs in every village and adding to earnings of low-income families. Serving close to 1000 people were village. This also creates a last mile distribution network most recently used to distribute sanitation products to direct to households in the Covid19 pandemic.
The marketing in 58 villages is carried out by Self Help Group women and 22 kiosks are owned by them putting women in the center of a development activity and as trusted, respected and entrepreneurial members of the community.
Wealth and asset creation in rural villages
Village entrepreneur partners including Self Help Group women are in a profit-sharing relationship with Spring Health while providing services and building a water asset in the community.
Extreme low-cost technologies
Technologies employed in the case of electro-chlorination where 3 USD 250 electro-chlorinators can produce sufficient chlorine oxidants to sanitize 80,000 litres per day.
The other technology employed using Auropure machines has extremely low running cost with an output of 4000 litres a day run entirely on solar power and consuming only INR 1500/ USD 20 a year in input chemicals as against delicate membranes used in RO machines.
Zero effluent generated in process
Unlike reverse osmosis that creates as effluent upto 60% of the input, both electro-chlorinator and Auropure technologies create zero effluent.
Rapidly scalable
Modular scale up and replication. A team of 18 staff can open 25 village kiosks a month and scale up can be modulated by increasing number of teams.
Spread – update Currently in Khurda, Jajpur, Puri and Dhenkanal districts covering 200 villages
Impact on Health
Empirical studies reveal that people who use safe drinking water most of the time reduce the incidence of illness by 41% and frequent users of safe drinking water by 27%.
This translates as positive economic impact per family of five in a typical village in India.