CEO Insights Magazine

Challenges pertaining to environmental sustainability and climate change are consistently emphasizing water as the most imperative element of our lives. Acknowledging water as a social infrastructure business and the necessity to build a sustainable value in the business model around it, Swach Environment Private Limited is building a unique & holistic environmental infrastructure services proposition under the aegis of Sourav Daspatnaik, Managing Director of the company. Leveraging his 33-years strong professional expertise and cross functional experience across functions such as manufacturing, marketing & sales, human resources, strategy and operations across diverse industries, Sourav has been quite successful in building an efficient team, and processes based on reliability, ethics, and trust. With his expertise laying in straddling vision, strategy with execution, Sourav is motivated by the vision of our Honorable Prime Minister 'Har Ghar Nal se Jal', ensuring water to every household of the country by 2024 and is envisioning to take the company to a brighter future by working with the Governments towards nation building.

Below is the excerpt of Sourav's interaction with the team of CEOx Insights.

Enlighten us with the journey of Swach Environment so far along with the distinctiveness it offers in comparison to the other competitors in the market.
We are the Infrastructure Developer working in the field of Water & Waste Water Utility Segment and directly impact the large spectrum of society by improving their quality of life. At Swach, we have focused on developing Water and Waste Water Infrastructure under Build Own Operate and Transfer (BOOT) and working closely with Central and State Governments to develop sustainable social infrastructure and adopting best practices in the construction, operation and management of water assets. Most of the investments made by Swach to date are through the PPP mode and involve long term concessions spread over 15 years. Hence, risk

management of the project including ensuring long term viability is of immense importance.

How does your industry experience help you in molding strategic business plans for the company against the changing market requirements?
Believing in a frugal business model, we approach the projects and investment decision with long term risk management and stress test features while devising the business and financial models. However, being a flat organization, we have the advantage of quick decision making coupled with passion and risk taking ability to take advantage of an opportunity that meets the ESG goals. Swach believes in preparing the risk matrix for any investment proposal pertaining to projects and having a backup plan for risk mitigation. This helps to offset Construction Risk, Financial Risk and Business Risk related to Revenue Goals.

Kindly throw some light on ‘clean city' services that your company offers, highlighting your flagship service.

Swach is poised to provide 24x7 drinking water supply up to the Functional Household Tap Connection(FHTC) to the end users along with the Smart Metering Infrastructure and SCADA based Automation Systems for effective and realtime monitoring of Quality and Quantity. The company is capable of treating the waste water generated from cities to fulfill the requirement of `one city one operator' concept, Swach is in partnership with Technology leaders to deliver SMART water solutions including Smart water metering, reduction in Non Revenue Water (NRW) as well as Municipal Waste processing, conversion of organic waste to BioFuel and many innovative solutions. Swach has also tied-up with leading global agencies to provide IoT enabled sanitation solutions and address WASH challenges for economically weaker communities.

Please tell us about your current projects. What are your upcoming projects or expansion plans?
Through an SPV with Veolia of France, we are currently executing one of India's largest PPP 24x7 water treatment and distribution project including house service connection (AMR Water meter), billing and collection, Customer service under Delhi Jal Board, NCT Govt. of Delhi with an estimated value of over Rs. 650 crore. The project was initiated in 2013, spread over 137 sq. km. and covers six assembly constituencies of Delhi and envisages servicing over 1.2 million people. Swach in JV partnership has formed an SPV Haldia Water Services presently doing repair, refurbishment, operation and maintenance of 24x7 Water Supply Project (50 MGD) at the industrial city of Haldia, West Bengal including billing and collection of revenue from customers. This is one of the largest PPP of Water works in West Bengal.

We believe the area of Smart metering and IoT based Asset monitoring in water utilities to improve efficiency, reduce losses and improve overall delivery is an emerging opportunity. Swach believes in working with a 360-degree approach and build a long term asset life cycle management value proposition. We work with patience and generally avoid aggressive bidding and to work with patience for the right opportunity to drive sustainable benefit. Apart from participating in BOOT projects of NMCG projects for various STPs, Swach is also exploring inorganic growth by acquiring existing water utility assets. In this context, we are working with leading advisors to develop and implement a growth strategy coupled with raising growth capital soon.

Sourav Daspatnaik, Managing Director, Swach Environment
An engineering and management professional with 33 years of cross functional experience, Sourav is currently Managing Director, Swach Environment Private Limited. He also serves as the Director, Nangloi Water Services, established under PPP for supplying 24x7 water as a concessionaire of Delhi Jal Board, Government of NCT Delhi and Director Haldia Water Services, established to provide 24x7 water services as utility under Haldia Development Authority, GoWB. He also serves as an independent director in several Indian companies and mentors social enterprises in the area of innovative and clean technologies for water supply and sanitation. Currently, he is the member Advisory Board of Innovation and Business Accelerator Center (IBAC) set up by FICCI and West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC), GoWB.