Social Entrepreneur of the YearWorld Economic Forum
2026
Water. Secured.
We build, own and operate water treatment infrastructure that millions rely on.
The problem
Build. Neglect. Runaway.
Raising money to build water infrastructure is comparatively easy. Raising money to run it is not. So the sector builds, runs away, and builds again, and it is usually a decade before anyone counts how many of those plants still produce water.
01
Build
A capital budget is spent and a plant is commissioned. This part works, and it is the part almost everybody is willing to fund.
02
Neglect
Year two arrives with no operating budget. Media exhausts, a pump fails, a repair has no line item, and output falls long before anyone records that it has.
03
Runaway
Whoever built it is already somewhere else. Households go back to the tubewell they were warned about, and the next programme puts a new plant beside the dead one.
Everything below is arranged around the second and third steps.
The solution
A horse, a harness, hay, and a habit.
Those are the four words we use internally for every site we run. A plant keeps producing water only when all four are in place, and three out of four is how you get the cycle above.
Horse
the media
The chemistry that does the work, efficient enough that treated water can be sold for a fraction of a rupee per litre.
Harness
the format
The form that chemistry arrives in, sized to the geography: a household filter, a kiosk, or a government piped scheme.
Hay
who pays for it
The money that covers running costs after commissioning. Tariffs, taxes or transfers, named site by site.
Habit
who keeps it running
The operator on the ground and the contract that keeps us on the hook for uptime long after the ribbon is cut.
One media platform
Three delivery formats
0.25 m³/hr
500 m³/hr
Hand-pump retrofit to mega-PWS on one media and one regeneration model.
700+
Treatment plants deployed
2.5B+
Litres processed
2
Countries operating
2017
Earliest systems still in service
The horse · the media
A bead the size of a grain of sand.
Each bead is a durable polymer sphere impregnated with iron and zirconium oxide nanoparticles. The result is an enormous internal surface that binds the target contaminant on contact, then releases it on command during regeneration. Proprietary, invented in the USA, manufactured in our own plant in Kolkata.
Arsenic
< 10 ppb
WHO guideline limit; removes As(III) and As(V)
Fluoride
< 1.5 mg/L
WHO guideline limit; rapid adsorption kinetics
Water recovery
95–99%
Against 40–50% for reverse osmosis
Service life
5–10 years
Per charge, regenerated on site every 6–12 months
Listed in the Ministry of Jal Shakti's Mashelkar Committee compendium. CSIR approved. The family extends to HIX-Nano™ 300 (hardness), 400 (nitrate) and 500 (ammonia).
The harness · the format
Governments procure a working deployment, not a resin.
The same media is delivered in whatever form the geography needs. Every format arrives installed and serviced, with trained local operators, remote monitoring and scheduled on-site regeneration.
Household filter
Tabletop and gravity-fed, for habitations a piped scheme has not reached yet.
Learn more
Community kiosk · Water ATM
1,000+ litre-per-hour kiosks with prepaid card dispensing, metered to the litre.
Learn more
Piped water scheme
HIX slots into the treatment train of an existing government distribution network.
Learn moreThe hay · who pays for it
Every plant we run names who pays for year two.
Nobody expects a horse to feed itself, and a treatment plant is no different. There are only three ultimate sources of money for running a water service, and we record which one carries each site we operate, because a site carried by none of them has a date on it whether or not anyone has written that date down.
Tariffs
The people drinking the water pay for it, metered to the litre and priced to be affordable daily rather than cheap once.
Water ATMs across Dhaka and Chattogram, and every prepaid-card kiosk.
Taxes
A public budget pays for treated water it has committed to supply to its own citizens.
PHED piped schemes under the Jal Jeevan Mission, billed on volume delivered.
Transfers
Philanthropy, CSR and outcomes payments from outside the water system, used to carry the years before a tariff or a budget line can.
Catalytic capital placed against a defined handover, not an open-ended subsidy.
Debt is not a fourth source. Working capital from a development bank bridges against future tariffs, taxes or transfers. It does not replace them, and a site standing on debt alone is a site nobody has funded yet.
The habit · who keeps it running
We are paid for water delivered, not hardware shipped.
That one choice puts the cost of a stopped plant on us rather than on whoever inherited it. We finance, install, monitor and maintain every site we build, with our own crews on a regeneration schedule. A plant that stops running stops earning.
Per litre
How we are paid
Revenue follows water actually delivered, not equipment sold.
6–12 months
Regeneration interval
Scheduled on site by our own crews. No media replacement, no landfill.
Remote
Monitoring
Flow, uptime and dispensing telemetered off every connected site.
Local
Operators
Trained and paid in the community the plant serves.
Work with us
One product, sold at four depths.
Whether you are buying media by the cubic metre or handing us a district, you are buying the same four parts. What changes is how many of them we carry after commissioning.
01 · EPCs, OEMs and treatment firms
Media supply
HIX-Nano by the cubic metre, with the regeneration protocol, for firms building their own treatment trains. You design it, you install it, you run it.
Horse
Harness
Hay
Habit
02 · EPCs and contractors
Turnkey systems
A complete plant, engineered to your raw water analysis and delivered ready to install. You commission it and hand it over to the client.
Horse
Harness
Hay
Habit
03 · PHEDs, DPHE and utilities
Build and operate
We bid the tender, build the scheme and run it under a multi-year operations contract, with our own crews and remote monitoring. A public budget pays for the water delivered.
Horse
Harness
Hay
Habit
04 · Utilities and CSR partners, under PPP
Finance, own, operate
We put in the capital, own the asset and are paid per litre dispensed. If the plant stops producing, our revenue stops with it.
Horse
Harness
Hay
Habit
Read the fourth column as risk rather than as scope. Hay is the last part we take on, because carrying it means carrying the money ourselves instead of invoicing someone else for it.
What we remove
Five contaminants. One media platform.
Institutional backing
The people who audit us keep funding us.
Multilaterals
- World Bank
- Asian Development Bank
- UNICEF
Bilaterals
- US State Department
- JICA
- GIZ
Corporations
- Unilever
- Danone
- Cisco
$138M
Asian Development Bank sovereign loan
Signed in 2026 to accelerate safe water access across Bangladesh.
Read the announcementRecognition
Awards
National Water AwardASSOCHAM
2025
MB100 Global LeadersMeaningful Business
2026
Featured in
The Business of Impact in a Changing WorldForbes
2026
Thirst Trap: New Ideas to Fix an Old ProblemThe Economist
2021
The Young Entrepreneurs Tackling Water CrisesBBC
2018
Safe water, on a meter, that still works in year ten.
If you run a utility, a district, or a fund that pays for water infrastructure, we should talk.
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