“Tangram”

The Piramal Challenge

“RESEARCH PLAN ON PIRAMAL FOUNDATION

SARVAJAL CASE STUDY 3”

Program : MBA FT (2019- 21)

Team : Abhyuday
1. Aakash Chavda (191302)
2. Tanmay Sharma (191458)
3. Utsab Chatterjee (191160)
Dated : 25 / 10 / 2019

Institute of Management, Nirma University,

Ahmedabad
RESEARCH PLAN ON PIRAMAL FOUNDATION SARVAJAL CASE STUDY 3
The issue of water scarcity and lack of pure drinking water is very widely spreaded across the world.
Piramal Group has came up with an initiative of fighting this problem by introducing the programme
“Piramal Sarvajal”, which provides pure drinking water at very cheap rate by installing the water
purifiers and water ATMs.

In this research paper, we are proposing a method to select a proper location where the system should
be implemented and operated so that the needy people get the benefits and the operation cost can be
received. The paper talks about the use of geospatial data to predict the needy area.

Aakash Chavda, Tanmay Sharma, Utsab Chatterjee, MBA student, Institute of Management, Nirma
University

Here the case study focuses on how to track and identify the right centres of scarcity of
accessible and purified water in a more timely and effective manner.
Here the main stakeholders are the rural people and people in those areas where water is
very scarce. Even in those areas where water is available it may be infected with contaminants
such as fluoride and other microscopic organisms. Along with them the people of Piramal
Foundation involved in communications, the top management and their associated members
are other stakeholders. Also, scientists and technocrats related to tracking of water resources,
weather data specialists can be major stakeholders to gain insights. In fact, government
bodies such as agriculture associations and Indian meteorological department can be other
secondary stakeholders to explore about the topic in detail.
Here we have used the soil moisture percent content of two years 2018 and 2019 and have
tracked down five such places of scarce water resources. The places are Sirohi of Rajasthan,
Wardha of Maharashtra, Tiruvallur of Tamil Nadu, Balleri of Karnataka and Ameli of Gujarat
for our study. Soil moisture is an important variable in the climate system. Understanding and
predicting variations of surface temperature, precipitation, drought, flood, and the impacts
of future climate change depend critically on knowledge of soil moisture variations. We have
selected these five places on the basis of the trend of soil moisture content of the two years
2018 and 2019.
We have used the hypothesis that soil moisture is an essential indicator of the groundwater
and other water sources as the water gets accumulated in the groundwater through the
percolation of the soil moisture on an average. Hence, we would further like to investigate
about the other factors apart from soil moisture that might contribute to the availability of
water resources.
For finding out the other factors contributing to availability of pure and abundant water we
have to research with the executives in the JAL SHAKTI MINISTRY level. Also, we have to

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discuss this issue with scientists and engineers working in this field to continuously improve
the issue of availability of purified water on a timely basis.
It is necessary to understand the trends in the monsoon patterns, the nature of the soil and
the socio-economic factors operating in the specific areas we want to research upon. Hence
enquiries would be made regarding these through interaction with subject experts such as
geologists, economists and meteorological specialists through group discussions, sampling of
data and understanding the overall standard deviation of the trend and hence taking out
inferences. All these methodologies would help in our research on effective implementation
of finding out the right locations for delivering pure and abundant water in a cost effective as
well as efficient manner.

Figure -1 : Soil moisture October-18. Here Red and white regions shows the low amount of
soil moisture while yellow and blue shows good soil moisture.
Source : https://vedas.sac.gov.in/vedas

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 Figure -2 : Soil moisture October-19. Here Red and white regions shows the low amount of
soil moisture while yellow and blue shows good soil moisture.
Source : https://vedas.sac.gov.in/vedas

We have used the hypothesis that soil moisture is an essential indicator of the groundwater
and other water sources as the water gets accumulated in the groundwater through the
percolation of the soil moisture on an average. Hence, we would further like to investigate
about the other factors apart from soil moisture that might contribute to the availability of
water resources.
This method can be implemented along with the existing method “Scoping” employed by
Piramal group. This method eliminates the problem of false positives and false negatives, as
the data source gives day to day soil moisture data of any region and previous years data.
Which would help to verify the target location.
Along with the method it is also important to ensure that the Opex is recovered by achieving
targeted target of water distribution. This can be implemented by studying the per capita

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income of that particular location. Comparing both of the data we can achieve good accuracy
of selecting the location where the project can be implemented.

Ground water quality:

Along with this paper a PDF file of Block wise Ground Water Resources Assessment -2017 is
also attached. Which indicates the quality of the water. This can also help identifying the
location for installing the system.