Watsan Envirotech Pvt Ltd.
“Science should be the fulcrum or catalysts to remove the pain of the common man, otherwise it is not worth studying”, says J. Chandrasekaran, founder of WATSAN Envirotech Private Limited.
Being born to a family with five children, Chandrasekaran learnt to adjust with things available to him from the very young age. He grew up in Madurai’s Tirunagar locality and has an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and a Postgraduate diploma in Plastic Technology. As he was from a middle class family, Chandrasekaran faced many hurdles during the initial stages of his career. BPA free breast feeders for foster parents were one of his first innovations. He always believed in understanding the pain and then solving the problem.
After coming back to Chennai, he started documenting the more than 1,25,000 ruined temples within Tamilnadu. There were temples from 2 BC with many inscriptions and sculptures. But what amused Chandrasekaran most is the magic of the material science behind the architectures. There was no iron, steel or cement. They were build using lime mortar, galnut and jaggery. After all this years, these temples stood stronger in spite of vegetation growing on top of them. He, along with some other heritage enthusiasts, founded REACH Foundation, a NGO working for the restoration of heritage structures in India. They cleaned the vegetation, reverse engineered and restored the ruined parts of the temples.
For documenting the dilapidated temples, he visited over 300 villages in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. There he witnessed the pressing need of water and sanitation in rural India. There was enough water but not enough drinking water. The villages had to depend on bottled water whose authenticity was unknown.
Another issue was the lack of enough toilets. Chandrasekaran took this challenge as an opportunity and started thinking for a solution to tackle this problem using technology.
That is how WATSAN born in 2013 after five years of research. WATSAN is a compilation of two words, water and sanitation which Chandrasekaran want to make accessible to people.
A major challenge in the sanitation of rural India is the construction of toilets due to limited resources and man power. Chandrasekaran always believed that the resources we need will be available around us. His search ceased at a huge amount of fiber glass discarded by the windmill industry. Once the idea got approval, they started constructing toilets in the villages of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Thiruthuraipoondi is one such village where 40 toilets were constructed with the help of women from self-help groups. They were given training and subsequently they started building toilets by themselves using the kits provided by WATSAN.
The amount of fluorides, arsenic and other carcinogens in water is very high in rural areas. While exploring a solution for this, Chandrasekaran came across the information that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Institution of Minerals and Materials Technology (CSIR-IMMT) had come up with a clay candle with nanopores to purify water. He obtained license and started manufacturing purifiers using the clay candles. After the selection of suitable clay and sawdust, it will undergo a 13 day cycle of mixing, soaking and burning after which it is assembled in plastic purifiers for electricity free water purification. WATSAN’s water purifiers are being effectively used by over 3.0 lakh people in the country and it is even being used by the Border Service Force to provide drinking water in the time of emergencies and disasters. WATSAN has also provided employment to many people, especially women.
“I want to engage more people in our journey so that the solution is more accessible. I want to provide more training to rural women and equip them with skills that will make them able to test the water they use,” says Chandrasekaran.
WATSAN received the best startup award by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in 2017 and the Waterpreneur Award by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 2018. He is also fellow of the Leaders of Innovation Fellowship Program from the Royal Academy of Engineering, London and was the TEDx speaker in IIM Trichy, in January 2020.
Over these years, WATSAN has reached up to 350000 people across the boundaries of India and the journey is continuing.
There are many challenges in delivering drinking water in the county. In north-east there is high amount of arsenic content in the water which will cause cancer while in Rajasthan, Telengana and Karnataka , there is fluoride in water which causes bone diseases. Even though there is enough water, there is not enough drinking water. For meeting this challenge, Chandrasekharan designed electric free water purifiers which can be used anywhere.
TWhile Chandrasekaran was looking into electricity-free solutions to make drinking water more accessible, his mentor told him about a clay candle with nanopores developed by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology (CSIR-IMMT) that could be used to purify water efficiently. He then obtained a candle manufacturing licence and began producing purifiers at WATSAN's facility in Kanchipuram's Kidangarai Village. WATSAN manufactures and distributes Terafil water purifiers. These are low-cost, effective, electricity-free water purifiers that are being used by over 2.5 lakh households in the country. The purifiers come in a variety of sizes and are essentially made up of two containers. In the first container, a Terafil candle made of Nano-clay particles is put. This section of the purifier filters out germs such as bacteria and viruses, allowing clean, potable water to flow to the bottom container.
Currently, WATSAN has two units, the manufacturing unit in Kidangarai and the assembling unit in Chennai where about 28 women are involved in the manufacturing process. During the floods in Kerala, Odisha, and Chennai, WATSAN sold around 5000 purifiers to NGOs in each of these states.
They have roughly six NGO partners who contact them and purchase these purifiers, making them available to the general public. These purifiers are also used by Jawans on the Wagah Border. They also have a partnership with a large online food delivery service, which uses their water purifier in their cloud kitchen. WATSAN's solutions have had an impact on people far beyond the country's borders. Pilots are currently being conducted in Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar.