With India’s low rankings on the global sanitation index, a number of companies have cropped up to take on the toilet market – Svadha, a social venture, is one of these.
Focused on water hygiene and sanitation in the rural market, Svadha focuses on bringing a level of standardization through local entrepreneurship, says CEO Garima Sahai.
“[Because of] India’s historic caste system, people thought if you had a toilet it had to be fancy and very expensive,” says Sahai, a former lawyer and World Bank specialist with expertise in international human rights laws.
Svadha aims to prove to their rural customers that toilets aren’t just for the wealthy.
India’s rural sanitation market is estimated to be worth approximately $25 billion - $10 to $14 billion of this from the demand for rural toilets alone.
Svadha, supported under the Toilet Board Coalition’s first Toilet Board Accelerator program this year, was founded by Sahai and social activist KC Mishra in mid-2014, after running a series of pilot tests starting in 2012.
“We see sanitation business model innovations taking shape in very locally-specific ways,” says Toilet Board Coalition Executive Director Cheryl Hicks. “In India there is a clear focus on volume – solutions that can deliver basic sanitation at scale.”
The Toilet Board Coalition, an alliance that supports innovative, market-led sanitation solutions, say India is on their radar in this sector as a result of the country’s scale and potential.
“India is incredibly rich for business solutions to the sanitation crisis,” says Hicks. “The government’s Swachh Bharat, ‘Clean India’, mission is demanding swift actions – there is recognition that business has a key role to play to innovate at all levels.”
Svadha’s concept revolves around offering a bundle of solutions to a rural consumer – from proper brick and mortar buildings with latrines to sustainable waste management solutions. These are sold through local entrepreneurs who are also trained to follow up with post-sale management and repairs.
Pricing for the various packages ranges anywhere from $27 to $230.
Key to the business is the building of a network of local entrepreneurs trained to become "one-stop" shops for consumers wanting to purchase and maintain their sanitation product without running around to different small vendors with unreliable stock.
Providing not only village entrepreneurs, but significantly, a larger number of small entrepreneurial hardware shops on the periphery of small towns and villages with business, Sahai says they’ve managed to turn around what is a highly subsidized sector through supporting many of these entrepreneurs instead of competing with them.
“In the Indian sanitation market there is very limited coverage in rural villages,” says Sahai. “A lot of it comes from the staunch social caste system, especially in rural areas, which has prohibited toilet construction.”
This has provided Svadha with the opportunity to enter the market from a largely tribal state, Orissa, on India’s east coast. They are also working their way into the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which have the worst figures for open defecation in the country, followed by Orissa.
“The male dominance factor exists in India,” says Sahai “Meaning it is not as important for them as it is for females to have a toilet.”
Male dominant states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where rural society tends to prohibit women from expressing themselves, have fallen behind in the sanitation stakes.
She says the percentage of available toilet and sanitation services is much higher in South India where matriarchal societies have existed for generations.
Although the social context varies from state to state, India has one common issue: the severe lack of latrine facilities. Svadha wants to make sure each home has one, rather than focus on community toilets. They also want to prove that providing toilets and maintenance for their products isn’t just a free service, there’s also money to be made.
“Our optimistic benchmark by the end of 2017 is to reach operational break-even,” says Sahai. “By 2018 we want to reach cash-flow break even, then scale up.”
