Problem

Bengaluru is a rapidly-growing city projected to have 13 million residents in 2020. The city’s water utility, Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), serves nearly 1 million connections with a diverse customer base spread across varied neighborhoods. Most of these connections are metered by manually-read meters of various types and brands.

Bengaluru faces challenges similar to those faced by large cities globally in efficiently distributing water, but also has to deal with intermittent supply operations. The first challenge is real water losses because of physical leaks, overflows, etc. The second challenge, often unaddressed, is apparent or commercial losses. Long-term environmental and city sustainability will be made possible only by addressing both challenges.

Apparent or commercial losses occur because of customers paying an incorrect lower tariff rate for their metered volume; meters inaccurately registering a lower volume; customers who are not listed in the utility’s database; meters being read incorrectly or the bills being generated incorrectly; properties which have been listed as vacant but still consuming water, etc.

Apparent losses also show up in the sewerage fee (which is added to water charges in the monthly bill generated by BWSSB) which is dependent on an accurate metering of the water consumed but is also dependent on whether the property has a borewell. The sewerage fee is also determined by the number of units in the property, whether the usage is non-domestic, etc.

In order to accurately recover revenue and to provide a fair equitable service, BWSSB urgently needs to reduce its apparent losses. However, identifying such losses is extremely difficult. Hundreds of meter readers fan out each month to manually type in the readings from the meter’s dial at the customer locations. The meter reader cannot easily assess if the drop in consumption is because residents have gone away on vacation; the neighborhood seeing reduced supply hours; repairs in the network upstream of the connection; the meter being faulty; or if the property is engaging in misuse or fraud. In addition, with the city rapidly urbanizing, the utility cannot always keep up with properties that have jumped from a lower tariff category/slab to a higher one - for example, a single-family home being replaced by a multi-unit mixed-use apartment complex.

Solution

In 2019, SUEZ in India launched the first ‘DATACITY’ program in Asia, in collaboration with Govt. of Karnataka, BWSSB and their innovation partner NUMA Bengaluru, an international innovation and learning hub. DATACITY is an international open innovation program building solutions to address the challenges of global cities.

DataCity Bengaluru brought together BWSSB and SUEZ to co-create a problem statement. After multiple design-thinking workshops, the pilot identified was “How might we enable BWSSB to identify revenue losses, highlight the potential for increasing revenue generation and expedite ROI.” After a rigorous selection process, SmartTerra, a startup in the urban water management space, was identified.

SmartTerra is developing an AI-powered operational intelligence platform to help water utility operators and cities transition from ad-hoc operations to predictive and efficiency-driven operations. SmartTerra previously won a deployment grant from the Urban Drinking Water Challenge 2018 by ImagineH2O and is incubated at T-HUB in Hyderabad. SmartTerra’s focuses on challenges at the intersection of the utility and the city, such as water distribution losses, network health and efficient distribution. SmartTerra aspires to build solutions that transcend human-scale and utilize AI to solve pressing urban challenges.

Impact

The pilot area chosen was the D1A zone, which is Suez’s O&M concession in central Bengaluru. D1A is split into 43 District Metered Areas (DMAs) and contains about 90K connections. These connections are categorized by BWSSB into nearly 40 classifications such as Domestic, MultiHouse, Non-Domestic, etc.

Two years’ worth of monthly meter readings (Oct 2017 to Sept 2019) were obtained from the Revenue, Billing and IT (RBIT) department at BWSSB. Attributes about each connection such as the location, the presence of a borewell, the type of the meter, etc., were also part of the data. Two years worth of daily supply information was provided by the SCADA department at Suez along with network maps, DMA boundaries, etc.

Image by rony michaud from Pixabay