NextDrop is an Indian start-up created in 2011 that offers a crowdsourcing data program aiming at improving urban water services management with mobile technologies. It provides access to real-time information regarding water availability and improves cooperation between citizens, government bodies and water utilities. NextDrop saw an opportunity to contribute to solving India’s urban water scarcity problem by betting on mobile technologies as 100% of India’s urban population is covered by mobile networks. To date, the NextDrop service has been implemented in four Indian cities: Hubli, Dharwad, Bangalore and Mysore.

The city of Bangalore faces a severe water crisis: while the population grew 47% from 2001 to 2011 to over 8.4 million, the water supply has risen only 12% from 2002 to 2012. The governmental agency responsible for water supply and sewage disposal in the city is the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB). Due to water scarcity, BWSSB is forced to ration supply to the extent that some areas of the city receive water once every two days through the piped network. BWSSB estimated that the proportion of non-revenue water was as high as 45%. The water supply is controlled by about 400 “valve men” who manually operate by turning on and off 8000 valves around the city each day. Valve men are assigned a schedule but are unable to always follow it for a variety of reasons making supply times unpredictable. So far, BWSSB and consumers have not had visibility into actual supply times because there has been no real-time feedback from the valve men. As a result, BWSSB engineers say they receive 100-150 calls every day for information on water supply. To bridge the information gap, BWSSB started working with NextDrop in 2014. The start-up had deployed its service in 40% of the city’s territory by the end of 2014, corresponding to an area with over 250.000 households and had 7.004 households signed up. In September 2015, NextDrop won the tender of BWSSB to implement the program in the remaining territory of Bangalore.

At the core of NextDrop’s service is the use of mobile communication technology to gather and disseminate information. Concretely, the NextDrop solution works as follows:

• Valve men submit information to NextDrop servers through an IVR system (voice call) or, more recently, a mobile app, regarding whether the valve is being closed or opened in order to gather accurate information regarding water distribution schedules in different areas of the city.
  
• Once the NextDrop central server receives water supply information from the valve men, it creates an SMS alert addressed to the appropriate set of consumers, adapted both to Smartphones and traditional mobiles. Service is free to household consumers.
  
• The solution also allows household consumers to give feedback to NextDrop on whether the water supply arrived on time through call centre, and feedback is registered in a Complaint Management System.
  
• All the information that NextDrop gathers from various channels and stakeholders is aggregated, analysed and available near real-time through interactive maps and dashboards to BWSSB officials as well as monthly meetings.
  

The NextDrop solution has had very positive results and brings benefits to all the parties involved:

• Water services providers get a clear view into their own operations, obtaining actionable data and gaining access to a convenient platform for consumer feedback. This opens possibilities to improve organizational efficiency, to make data-driven decisions and to reduce non-revenue water. Water utilities can improve knowledge about customer satisfaction and identify problems more easily; as well as monitor valve men work. Access to timely information on the status of water services (open, closed, broken) ensures a rapid response to technical issues. As a result, both the service’s quality and the customer’s willingness to pay improve. As NextDrop’s pilot highlighted, providing near real-time information of water valves’ status to BWSSB and to consumers led to a regularization and stabilization frequency and supply timing and to a 90% reduction in complaints. Moreover, by providing a better service to more consumers and earning more revenue, water services providers can become more financially sustainable and less dependent on national government subsidies.
  
• Consumers benefit of improved and reliable services. Household consumers benefit from water alerts that helps them better plan their daily routine (avoid missing a day of work to wait for the water supply, for example) and increases the convenience (reduce queues to collect water) thus saving money and time for consumers. This is particularly important for vulnerable urban poor households. NextDrop provides a two-way communication channel between BWSSB and its customers, increasing transparency, accountability and trust in the water utility.
  
• Benefits for local governments by greater awareness and accountability. The ability for the Government to access information on water utilities’ operations increases accountability of how public funds are spent, ensuring that the right services are being delivered with the public money invested.
  

Although the solution proposed by NextDrop seems simple, it has faced several challenges during implementation:

• BWSSB’s piped network map was 15 years old, reflecting inaccuracies in the mapping of consumers in relation to valve areas. NextDrop had to refine its processes to proactively identify incorrectly mapped consumers and valves and had to work closely with BWSSB, consumers and valve men to correct it.
  
• NextDrop encountered difficulties in obtaining consistent and accurate data from “human sensors” showing how voluntary stakeholder participation is very sensitive. As Valve men are contracted by a third party company and do not respond to BWSSB, NextDrop found difficulties to get them to submit the correct information. Sometimes because they don’t have the information, or have too many valves to operate; they often forgot to report water timings, or submit it in batches of valves leading to delayed water alerts, etc. NextDrop had to implement training and incentive programs and active follow-up by supervisors for more than six months to ensure the valve men participation in the program, which increased with nearly 90% of valve men actively reporting by December 2014. To overcome this issue, NextDrop created the ValveKey mobile app to partially automate the process of data gathering, but that requires the valve men to use a Smartphone, which triggered resistance at first but was overcome with education and training.
  
• As NextDrop is a crowdsourcing data program, it needs to have a lot of users and consumers to make it work. Thus it was key to spread awareness of the services through several communication channels to ensure the success of the program.
  

More information:

http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NextDrop-Water-Simplified1.pdf