In 2019, a report released by NITI Aayog has stated that India is currently facing its worst ever water crisis. 21 cities would run out of groundwater by 2020 and by 2030, 40% of India's population will not have access to drinking water. Impacted cities include New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai – home to India’s biggest industries, enterprises and urban ecosystems. Not only will water shortage affect quality of life of residents of these cities, but also massively impact the national GDP. 

As the impending water crisis dominates news headlines across the country, technology can play a critical role in efficient water management. Bangalore-based Fluxgen Engineering Technologies uses IoT and AI to help manage and regulate water usage in industries. Currently, the company has more than 20 industrial customers, helping monitor, analyze water consumption, leakage and excessive water usage in food processing and manufacturing plants. Ganesh Shankar, founder & CEO of FluxGen says the goal of FluxGen is to help industries become water positive, and aims to help save 1 billion litres of water everyday using his product AquaGen, a wireless, IIoT-enabled water auditing system. 

Prior to starting FluxGen Engineering, Shankar worked with GE where he developed energy meters, and did a rural electrification project with Selco. "I believe these experiences led me to build technology that can have a tangible social impact." Shankar and his team started their journey by building a sensor that monitors water usage. Working with customers allowed them to understand granular needs and develop specific algorithms to address them. "The hardware ecosystem in India is a work-in-progress. While more startups are building sensors, their utility will increase manifold when they can gather data that is constantly uploaded on the FluxGen cloud that users can access via web or mobile. This is how AquaGen has evolved over the years."

With a strong social mission, and a robust product to boot, Shankar believes monitoring industrial water usage is the first step to become water positive, and has already executed projects in the dairy and clothing industry - both of which are known to consume exorbitant amounts of water. One of their most successful projects was at the Winner Dairy Farm in Puducherry. Typically, the farm processes 250,000 litres of milk everyday. Nearly 400,000 litres of water is consumed daily - either as Reverse Osmosis (RO) water, soft or hard water - sourced mainly from borewells and vendors. But the dairy unit had no way of monitoring the amount of water being used across all its processes, and over time, the groundwater levels started falling. The AquaGen cloud connector was connected to the plant’s flowmeter which measures water consumption at various points within the infrastructure, calculates total water usage and health of the infrastructure. This consumption pattern ensures a healthy and comprehensive water infrastructure. AquaGen monitors the level of the water in Overhead Tanks (OHTs) and sumps ensuring the availability of sufficient water. Within a month's time, certain anomalies were noticed with the help of the analytics from AquaGen. 

Last year after the lockdown was announced, making it impossible for the team to do installations for clients, FluxGen made some tweaks and improvisations in their product, roped in some local partners and improvised algorithms to make the device more resilient and plug-and-play. "One of the advantages of locally sourced components and PCBs was being able to pivot our product within a month during the lockdown. This ensured continuity of business even during a national lockdown, and with global supply chains coming to a grinding halt."

In addition to AquaGen, the startup has also built AgroGen, an IoT-based agriculture management system. In addition to being a key contributor to the GDP, agriculture also sees tremendous amount of water wastage and IoT is a hugely popular technology to help farmers manage water supply to crops, especially in water-poor areas. AgroGen harnesses efficient technologies, paving way for effective farming techniques for smart agriculture. Data-driven decisions on water usage, fertilizers, manure application, identifying healthy seeds, harvest time, soil moisture and humidity can make the sector resilient and efficient.