Know when next drop of water will come from your tap

HUBLI: Emily Kumpel, a civil engineering PhD student of the University of California, who often visits India for research purpose was disturbed to see Hubli people waiting for long hours for water to arrive. What she noticed was the city hardly adhered to its water supply schedule, thereby causing a great deal of inconvenience to residents in several areas.
'Intermittent water supply in India' being her research topic, Emily, on her returning to California discussed the issue with her professor Tapan Parikh at the Berkeley School of Information, University of California and a few students at the Stanford School of Business.
What emerged out of this scholarly discussion was a brilliant idea that appears to go a long way in helping people of Hubli keep their date with water supply. People will no longer have to wait for indefinite hours for the volveman to release water. If they subscribe to the services of Nextdrop, a social-business venture started by Emily and her team in Hubli, they will get information about the exact day and time of water supply to their respective areas on their mobile phones. So they can make sure they are at home during those hours.
When the idea of providing information to citizens through SMS struck them, Emily and her team, comprising students from the Stanford School of Business and the University of California, pooled funds from the class and decided to run a pilot project in Hubli. On arriving at Hubli, they came up with their novel project - Nextdrop - and launched it on a trial basis to cater to 230 families in a Hubli area.
Encouraged by the overwhelming response to the pilot project, the group deiced to convert the project into a full fledged social business in Hubli. Plans are afoot to extend it to Dharwad in the coming days.
Nextdrop is an integrated network between residents and valvemen. Explaining about how the system works, Nextdrop co-founder and CEO Anu Sridharan said valvemen will use their mobile phones to call an interactive voice response (IVR) system to inform people well in advance about when they plan to open the valves in a particular area. These reports will be used to generate SMS updates that will be sent to local residents 30-60 minutes prior to delivery.
In addition, the residents will be contacted randomly through IVR system to verify the accuracy of information provided by valvemen. Updates from valvemen will be turned into streaming visual data using a web-based dashboard powered by Google maps. This tool will help engineers track the status of valves throughout the city in real time, while crowd-sourced information will help compare the feedback from residents with reports from valvemen to create a feedback loop. In case of a conflict between two reports, engineers at the utility will be alerted, enabling them to address the problem.
To keep the social business running, each family will be charged Rs 10 per month for the services. For BPL families charges are Rs 5, said Anu.
"The technological principles behind Nextdrop are not new. The idea is based on the model of crowd-sourcing that has been around for a while. You could call Nextdrop a mix between Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing Internet marketplace, and Next Bus, a popular Californian website that tells you when your next bus will arrive so you don't have to wait indefinitely," said Anu.
The idea has bagged several international cash awards from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation and Google, Clinton Global Initiative University, Centre For Information Technology Research, GSM Association Mwomen Programme, Global Social Venture Competition and Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition.
HDMC commissioner K V Trilokchandra said it is a value added service to which residents can enroll voluntarily.