Spring Health’s Tryst: Selling Safe Drinking Water

Abstract

The case talks about Spring Health Water India Private Limited (referred as SH), a social enterprise delivering safe drinking water to the millions who are earning less than $2 per day. Chairman of Spring Health Paul Polak, took up for-profit business venture as a measure to ensure health and poverty alleviation in rural areas. The idea is to provide affordable drinking water through decentralized delivery and utilizing local resources and grassroot entrepreneurs to keep the drinking water prices low. This venture provided extra income to some of the villagers — as entrepreneurs, business assistants, delivery boys, masons and plumbers, etc. Many innovative methods are adopted in the process to reach out to all social groups, in least possible time and at highly affordable prices. Effort is made to maximize customer base by using marketing techniques which are culturally and socially sensitive. Technology used in the process of chlorination is simple and with little knowledge/experience a villager can handle it too. It is a low cost technology and hence utilizes less resources, which are easily available and do not require high costs of handling and managing. The target is to reach 200 million people in the coming years covering East Indian states of Odisha, Bihar, Eastern Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Jharkhand. To reach such scale, it requires concerted efforts on the part of company and a lot of funding support. Launch at each new village is a new challenge. Convincing rural masses on safe drinking water is a challenge and selling water with a price tag is not readily accepted in rural areas. Chairman Paul Polak and CEO Kishan Nanavati have a challenging situation of convincing people to buy safe drinking water and to mobilize funds for further expansion.