In City Prone to Drought, Chennai’s Water Packagers Rush In

Millions of residents rely on immense bottled water sector.

By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue – May 12, 2017

CHENNAI, India – Before he delivered bottled water to this city’s thirsty homes and businesses, T. Rajan tried all manner of entrepreneurial enterprises. He sold scrap paper and cardboard to recyclers. He built a street corner chai and cigarette cart, and repaired truck and bus tires. He started an office cleaning service for high-tech companies in Chennai’s growing IT sector south of the city center.

None of these micro-enterprises delivered financial returns and workday flexibility comparable to being a middleman selling clear, sky blue, 20-liter water “cans” (bottles) in Chennai’s immense packaged water industry. The 32-year-old business owner, stocky and muscled, fits the enterprise. Every day, Rajan explained through an interpreter, he and a partner purchase some 200, 20-liter water cans from one of the metropolitan region’s independent water bottlers.

Rajan buys the cans for 20 rupees each, about US 30 cents. He sells them for 35 to 45 rupees each (US 52 to US 68 cents). He loads 50 to 60 cans at a time on his diesel delivery truck, which is smaller than a compact American pickup. Operating the business for five years, Rajan has attracted steady customers – homeowners, hotel and office managers, and shopkeepers – and developed about 15 routes in the city.

The profit for each can averages 20 rupees in a competitive market. That amounts to a daily profit of roughly 4,000 to 4,500 rupees ($US 60 to $US 68). Splitting the revenue two ways and setting aside money to cover vehicle maintenance and fuel expenses, Rajan nets 12,000 rupees a week ($US 180). Though modest by western standards, 12,000 rupees is a robust income for a mid-level business manager in Tamil Nadu’s capital city.

“It is good for me right now,” said Rajan, who is 32-years-old and has a wife and baby daughter. “I’m young. I can carry the cans. We sell good water. Our customers trust it.“

Chennai Expands Water Supply

With 8.5 million residents within its boundaries, and nearly 2 million more in the metropolitan region, Chennai is India’s fourth largest city and one of its fastest growing. Since 2000, the Chennai metro area has added an average of 265,000 residents a year, according to national census figures. The central government, state, and the Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board, the city’s water utility, have spent tens of billions of rupees to expand reservoir capacity, build canals to transport water from neighboring states, construct new water treatment plants, develop well fields in rural areas to fill tanker trucks, build two big drinking water desalination plants, pay for a third, and plan for a fourth.

The accumulated result is that in wet years Chennai’s water utility is capable of supplying about 1.3 million cubic meters of water a day (343 million gallons) to residents and businesses, almost double what it provided in 2005. Still, it is not nearly enough, even in a region with low rates of per capita water consumption. In many parts of Chennai, municipal water is shipped by trucks and supplied to households from big plastic tanks. In other sections of the city, water flows from home taps just a few hours a day.

With comparable population, New York City’s water utility supplies 4.3 million cubic meters of water a day (1.2 billion gallons) to 8 million customers in the five boroughs and 1 million more in four upstate counties.

Producing similarly large increases in water supplies for Chennai over the next decade will be even harder. The reason is that Chennai’s hydrological patterns are unstable and dangerous. In just the last 15 months the city has been drowned in a flood, battered by a cyclone, and dried up by the worst drought in 140 years.

Every meteorological assault – and they’ve become more numerous over the past 15 years – is accompanied by severe disruptions in municipal drinking water deliveries. Storms and floods knock out electrical power for pumps and inundate reservoirs and treatment plants with raw sewage.

In drought years, Chennai’s water supply sinks to alarmingly low levels. In an interview, K. Phanindra, the Tamil state government’s principal secretary for water, said more than a year of deep drought in 2016 and the first months of 2017 had dropped Chennai’s daily water deliveries to under 500,000 cubic meters per day. Reservoirs contain less than 20 percent of their capacity. Groundwater levels are receding, in some places by nearly 20 feet a year. “If we can get rain, we’ll be okay,” said Phanindra. “Right now it’s a very difficult situation.”

Water Bottlers Serve Big Demand

Chennai’s drinking water shortages, which have become endemic, open a supply breach that the city’s water bottlers rush to fill. Chennai’s bottlers also respond to a second public anxiety – the quality of municipal water. City residents prefer bottled water because they don’t trust that piped water is safe. “You get sick if you drink it,” said Rajiv, who spends 105 rupees a day for three cans of water to serve his customers at his Krish Serviced Apartments, a downtown hotel. “City water pipes mix with sewage pipes. The water looks bad. It tastes bad. Canned water is much better. Everybody uses canned water.”

With supply and safety driving the market, Chennai’s water bottling industry is said by authorities in India to be among the world’s largest, though it is not at all clear just how big it is. Three years ago, The Hindu, Chennai’s major newspaper, reported that 4,000 bottling companies operated in the state. The Tamil Nadu Packaged Drinking Water Association, the industry’s principal trade group, counts 1,200 members, perhaps a third of which operate in Chennai.

According to estimates by distributors and bottlers interviewed for this report, 10,000 people may be employed by 400 to 600 bottling companies that market over 100 brands in Chennai and the metropolitan region. As many as 15,000 people deliver 20 million liters of canned water daily. Thousands more drive tanker trucks that supply water to bottlers. Other facets of the industry are the suppliers and recyclers of all those water cans. Taken as a whole, Chennai’s water bottling sector could have revenues in excess of $US 180 million annually.

The money may be good but producing and selling bottled water in Chennai is a challenge. Though bottlers are required to adhere to government rules for purity and filtration, periodic inspections have hurt the industry because they reveal episodic instances of heavy metal and chemical contamination. In 2013, the National Green Tribunal, India’s high court for hearing environmental cases, identified over 800 bottlers in Tamil Nadu that were operating without required state permits.

Farms Supply Water

Not far away, in another segment of the bottling industry, 33-year-old Mahendran, a farmer, explains that a sizable share of his family’s income comes from selling well water from an informal depot they established on the farm. As many as 20 water trucks have filled their 12,000-liter tanks in a single day, he said. More routinely it’s 10 or fewer.

The farm charges 40 rupees per tanker (less than one US dollar). One of Mahendran’s brothers owns a tanker truck and can earn 1,500 rupees ($US 22.50) for every delivery to a bottling plant. “During a time like now. It’s very dry,” said Mahendran, through an interpreter. “We have water. So we can make money.”

Within the city’s boundaries much larger companies sit at the helm of the bottled water industry. One of them is TEAM, which produces 5,000 20-liter bottles of water daily under its brand of the same name.. That’s enough to make TEAM Chennai’s third largest marketer of bottled water, said V.M. Srinivasan, the company’s chief executive. “It’s not a big part of our overall business,” he said in an interview. “But it’s been a good part of the business.”

T. Rajan and his partner operate in the most visible sector of Chennai’s bottling industry: the water delivery teams. Their little water truck, packed with 20-liter plastic bottles, is part of the battalion of service vehicles that form a hefty portion of the city’s daytime traffic. Men hauling water on their shoulders block stairwells and cram into elevators all over Chennai. Rajan is well-known in the neighborhoods he serves. When drought or floods or storms batter the city, he is counted on to do his job. “We sell what people need,” he said. “All the time.”