Incubated at IIT Madras Environmental Management startup Greenvironment provides end-to-end customized IoT based solutions for water and wastewater management. Founder Varun Sridharan believes many innovations end at the prototyping stage, and one need to find, explore the scope and support such efforts. Every innovation should have commercial viability for the customer to survive in the Market.
Environmental Engineering devotes itself to finding out renewable sources of energy and solutions to curb pollution and other environmental issues, and towards a future of sustainable development. One of the most important responsibilities of environmental engineering is to prevent the release of harmful chemical and biological contaminants into the air, water and soil. The branch of Environmental Engineering is receiving more currency with the proliferation of industrialization and urbanization. Identifying the source of contamination environmental engineers work with businesses entities and society to avoid or reduce the production of pollutants or the disposal of wastes in a safe manner.
Greenvironment Innovation & Marketing India Private Limited has applied the Internet of Things (IoT) to the cause of water and wastewater management, providing real-time monitoring (RTM) and troubleshooting solutions for its customers. Founder and CEO Varun Sridharan is a first-generation entrepreneur who began with an idea to create a safe and greener environment aided by smart technology and innovation. Speaking to Machine Maker from Bangalore, where the company is based, Varun shared the story of Greenvironment and its accomplishments as an environmental management enterprise.
Greenvironment: Incubated at IIT Madras
Varun Sridharan, a Civil Engineer, began with the opportunity to work closely with the Centre of Excellence, IIT Madras on a project of decentralized wastewater management. The decentralized wastewater management was formulated by the government to treat the wastewater produced by commercial hubs and residential complexes like malls, societies, and parks. Subsequently, Mr Sridharan worked as a process engineer in an environmental management company in the Middle East. This gave him a considerable understanding of wastewater management in terms of locations, as in this case – India and the Middle East.
“That worked as a motivation to start a company which could solve problems related to wastewater management. I was fortunate to have my mentors from IIT Madras who supported me in this venture.” Mr Sridharan recollects,” I started Greenvironment with my father P Sridharan Nair and my professor Dr Ligy Philip. Like every first-generation entrepreneur I also had to face challenges in building this organization, but fortunately for us, the IIT Madras incubation platform had just formed in 2012. So the company got incubated and became part of the ecosystem in 2013.”
Since Greenvironment was given a lot of mentoring support and access to the laboratories. It also received a grant from the IIT Madras Alumni association for showcasing innovative ideas in the space the company was working on. So in 2014, Greenvironment developed what is called an online water quality monitoring system, a kit to carry out the water quality test and collect the data through mobile and send to a cloud platform. The online Water quality monitoring system was further developed with sensors communicating to the cloud and gradually the IoT platform came into being.
Varun Sridharan says, “We always were a core engineering team focusing to solve mechanical and electro-mechanical aspects in water infrastructure. We also received a soft loan from the Department of Science and Technology that can be considered as validation support. In 2016 we were part of some accelerators in the country like Global Cleantech Innovation Program and India Innovation Growth Program. The participation helped used to give shape to the business model. That was the root to what today you see as real-time monitoring (RTM).”
Made in India IoT Hardware for Water Management
In the last five years, the Indian industry segment has gone through a major change as far as the awareness of sustainability is concerned. An alarming study published by Niti Aayog about twenty-one cities will go out of the water by 2020. Mr Sridharan feels the study was one of the references from made people make decisions about water management. Many of Greenvironment’s customers really felt the problem in terms of not having enough water or about the right quality of water. Today the water management space has a lot of good companies, both software and hardware specific, to converge IoT and AI in water management.
“We could bring in here is to build indigenous hardware. The entire hardware used in IoT infrastructure is indigenously built at a lower cost. And also it has scalability features for different types of applications. It is like an add-on to any kind of infrastructure where we can customize our solutions for a specific need, be it for the residential, commercial or industrial segment. IoT gives a lot of domain expertise where one gets access to a lot of data which helps to explore newer spaces,” says Mr Sridharan.
In 2016-17 Greenvironment worked with the Government of Karnataka when a lot of lakes were polluted by foam and fire. At that time the government was looking for start-ups, under the project name Grand Challenges Karnataka, for monitoring the water bodies. Greenvironment was selected and was given the grant to do a pilot in the city. “The good thing about it was that the policy was also developed along with the availability of technology. The company was mentored by the Pollution Control Board who made us improve our product according to their ground requirement. Later it was made mandatory for all buildings to have online water monitoring. The Central Pollution Control Board has come out with a lot of strong policies in terms of online monitoring.”
Today the industries have to do online monitoring and report the data. Varun Sridharan says that Greenvironment is fortunate as we were given to work along with the requirements of the government. Greenvironment customers are from manufacturing industries, IT parks, corporate houses, hotels and hospitals, and it provides the entire infrastructure for water management. Varun Sridharan says, “If you are looking at a building, we are providing end-to-end water management solutions. The customer gets all the data on one single dashboard or a mobile app, and can ascertain the performance of the entire facility.”
SAS Model for Environmental Engineering
Today Greenvironment has a facility in Pune to get the products assembled and a testing unit in Calicut. ”There are three to four components which we integrate. The sensors are from the technology partners. But there are also some sensors which we make. The best part that we learnt in IoT is that one needs a very good testing setup. Because the places where the sensors are set are going to be different”, adds Varun.
The regulatory changes are getting implemented in regard to the water management system. “But the challenge here is at the operational level. But the availability of technology at low cost has been the biggest challenge,” says Varun Sridharan. In 2016 Greenvironment decided to work on a solution-as-service model where the customer does not has to make any capital investment. “It was actually a turning point for us, where we received acceptance from different segments of customers. But at the end of the day acceptance will come when there is a real value,” Varun points out. Varun Sridharan is also hopeful in light of the fact that the student fraternity takes a lot of effort to build new and innovative solutions.
Innovating Affordable Technologies
“The students are doing a lot of self-learning and that aspect has developed different colleges in other parts of the country, especially in the IoT space. But one problem is that the prototype ends there and that is something that should be taken care of by the supporters and mentors. The students who have the know-how should be given an opportunity to go to the next stage. Overall the skill set is ample only the scopes need to there in place and opportunities need to be explored. And this has to be done with a commercially viable product in the mind. The deep tech companies keep sophisticating their hardware which does not find real field level application.”
“Once we develop a product we do not stop there. We keep developing new ones.” Two months ago Greenvironment received a call from a private hospital for temperature monitoring in the refrigerators with IoT where they will store the vaccines. We have few hospitals in Kerala where we have supplied such solutions. The acceptance of technology to a customer needs to be done at the development level otherwise there will never be a commercially viable solution. This approach of understanding a problem and solving it is what Mr Sridharan feels is required in the field of innovation and product development, keeping the affordability of the customer in mind.
