What is Human-Centered Design?
missionsustainability
September 13, 2024
From Concept to Reality: NeeRain's Simple Solution to Water Scarcity
By Ketul
Update 13 Sept, 2024
5 min read
Contents
A truly pathbreaking product is one that works brilliantly, and is so easy to use that it makes you wonder if there’s more to it. Meet NeeRain, a rainwater harvesting appliance that ticks both these boxes and is super cost-effective as well – sounds a bit unbelievable? Read ahead to uncover the founder, Amit Doshi’s fascinating story of how he built NeeRain from nothing!
Why NeeRain?
NeeRain started in 2018 with the objective to make the rainwater harvesting a common man’s movement. When Amit Doshi started studying water conservation in India, he realized that for most people, the logistics and the process of rainwater harvesting feels very complicated. This is why despite having enough rainwater and natural water resources, we still face scarcity of water – 63% of Indians don’t have fresh water for their daily use. That’s when he saw the massive gap in the market between the need of the hour and a simple, effective solution to fill that need.
From Problems to Solutions
As he studied the topic further, he started to understand the constraints in consumer mindsets that explained why rainwater harvesting was not being done more widely in the country. A common belief was that it was very difficult or impossible to fit a system once a house is already built / one would need to rebuild parts of their house / they would need professionals to purchase and install it / it would be very expensive / and it would be very time consuming.
Instead of being deterred by that, he saw each small problem as an opportunity. His aim was to create a compact plug-and-play product that could fit in any house or establishment, anytime, by the buyer himself or with the help of a local plumber and within a reasonable budget and requiring almost zero maintenance. As ambitious as this sounds, he eventually did it – using a very simple principle of water filtration by gravity!
The Start of the Journey
Amit and his team applied for a design patent in 2018 and after getting the provisional patent grant, started working on the actual model by the first wave of COVID. By the end of June 2020 they had launched Neerain – a completed molded appliance, ready to use. It felt like the first step towards solving the greater problem – people were surprised to find how easy it could be to install a rainwater harvesting solution in their households, and it got a lot of positive feedback for its simple and efficient features.
Challenges
One of the first challenges they knew they’d face would be how much a customer would have to spend on the product including purchase and installation. They were very clear they wanted something that a middle class person could also afford. The cost of the first model including installation went up to INR 11000-12000, which was a lot. They knew they had to change something. In the second version, they changed both filters to HDP (high density plastic) and the cost including installation came down to INR 5000-6000. The final product they ended up with was an EPS (expanded polystyrene) molded box with 3mm thickness, UV stabilized, scratch proof, with 25-30 years of unit life and a beautiful glossy finish that you’d be proud to have in your home.
The second challenge that NeeRain has very seamlessly solved and sidestepped is consumer worry that a product like this will be complicated to install and would not only need company professionals, but a lot of time / money. To tackle this upfront, they provide a simple video showing the entire installation process for the plumber and buyer to understand. Since the filters are static and don’t work on electricity, the only maintenance required for the product is occasional washing of the filters under running water before fixing it back in the system. Literally no tools are needed for this!
The third and the largest challenge NeeRain faced was one of perception. People obviously knew the importance of saving water and different ways of doing it but despite that, there was very low adoption of rainwater harvesting systems. After a lot of brainstorming on the psychology behind this, Amit realized that instead of pushing “rainwater harvesting” as a good practice to adopt, it would be more effective to show people how they could recharge their borewell water themselves and solve their water shortage problems!
He realized he needed to appeal to people’s fear of water running out in their homes. In Indian cities, we’re all unfortunately used to water running out in the summers and having to pay through our noses for tankers to come and supply water. More than 60% of people are dependent on ground borewell water and if that were to dry up there would be no water at all. In Amit’s words, “we changed the entire campaign and the psychology behind the product to – Raise water in borewells“. This was finally what worked and encouraged people to take action towards solving the problem and led to the fulfillment of the vision Amit desired.
Water Saving Vs Cost
Amit’s team calculated the water that would be saved in different cities by using their rooftop rainwater harvesting product, over the duration of one monsoon season.
In Gandhinagar/Ahmedabad – 60,000 liters / season
In Mumbai – 2.5 lac liters / season
In Bangalore – 1.2 lac liters / season
In the first year of installing the product, the water would pay for itself! When people realized that they could save money while also solving a bigger problem, that truly marked the turning point for NeeRain.
After the Tipping point
Seeing for themselves the simplicity and the effectiveness of the product, consumers started coming to NeeRain. Amit focused on single households where they advised people to connect NeeRain to the water supply pipelines. Since they had also simplified the installation process so that a local plumber or the buyer themselves could do it in a couple of hours, people’s trust in the product increased.
They started using it on bigger roofed buildings like building societies, colleges, offices etc and more water was getting collected in borewells, leading to actual ground water conservation. After the success of NeeRain in conserving groundwater, people started referring the product to friends and family, and within the first few years, NeeRain had installed 4000 units, with most of the business coming from semi-urban and rural areas. Their orders were from across 250 cities in India, some cities in Africa like Kenya, Malavli, Zimbabwe and from countries like Nepal and Guatemala too. Over a period of 2.5 to 3 years, these 4000 units saved nearly 90 crore liters of rainwater!
Amit Doshi & his story
Amit’s own journey started with many years in a corporate role in the solid waste management sector, but he couldn’t ignore the call of entrepreneurship that tugged at his heart, so at the age of 35 he decided to quit his job and deep-dive into starting his own business. He was keen to stay in the field of environment, as that had always been his passion and his skill-set.
With that in mind, he started consulting for waste management. Alongside, he also put in a lot of time and effort into researching what he wanted to do next. After a lot of study, the two reasons that he finally chose water harvesting to work with were that it wasn’t capital-intensive and that there were not many companies working in this field. Over the course of many conversations with various stakeholders, he recognised the gap in the market for a water harvesting and borewell recharge system and just went for it.
The business of NeeRain
NeeRain has a solid team working tirelessly on the backend. Co founder Nishal Shah, 2 civil engineers and 3 back office employees, who work on an ever-growing database of plumbers for customer convenience. People can get in touch with them through their helpline numbers or their website.
Future goals
The NeeRain team has an immense sense of gratitude towards the earth as they proudly talk about how their revenue has steadily grown from 5 lacs to 1 crore in 4 years. Their next goal is to hit a revenue of 5 crores in the next 2 years and reach not only all the Indian cities, but all other countries in the world too!
To conclude in Amit Doshi’s words – “It should start from an individual ‘i’ to institutions, from institutions to industries, and all the ‘i(s)’ put together will transform India to a water-positive nation!”
Facts
A family of 4 consumes, on average –
130-135 liters of water / person for drinking, cooking and other chores in urban areas
80-100 liters / person in semi-urban or rural areas
5 liters / person for drinking water
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