The demand for a consistent and affordable service to purify drinking water at their doorsteps has been rising from communities ever since Naandi set up the first pilot water purification site in 2005 at Bomminampadu village in Andhra Pradesh.

Working with village bodies and the community to give them cleaned drinking water at a nominal user fee (between 10 to 20 paise per litre) became the design for a safe drinking water delivery model that is today being followed by a wave of small and micro entrepreneurs across the country as their own social business.

There are still tens of thousands of habitations that drink unsafe water. And they need to be reached. It is Naandi’s vision that by 2020 everyone in rural India will be drinking safe water. This means approximately 50,000 villages will need to be reached every year.

To deliver efficient water purification and delivery services that even the poorest could use meant a ramping up of operations and services that no amount of grant funding could fuel. It needed investors. And it needed investments that would allow upscaling to reach more villages in a shorter time.

Inspired by Naandi’s vision and convinced that the user-fee revenue model made business sense, danone communities came forward as an investor. In 2010, the safe drinking water initiative moved out of Naandi Foundation’s ‘programmes’ silo and established itself as a social enterprise – the Naandi Community Water Services Ltd.

There are more than 400 water purification centres operating across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.

More than 3 million people have access to Naandi’s community based safe drinking water plants.

Since 2010, no plant has ever received a complaint regarding water quality or supply.

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