The business of water

PUNE: With the growing realisation that there are no free lunches, civic bodies want to be paid for services provided, including water supply.
Industry, for its part, has realised that inputs need to be quantified before they can control costs. Water, a major input, is paid for without exactly monitoring the quantity supplied.
Forbes Marshall, the Rs.150 crore group in the steam energy conservation and process control instrumentation businesses, is targeting the nearly Rs. 30 crore commercial water metering business.
"We have set up a special measurement technique, which meters the water. This is a device which pays for itself in a very short period. We are now working on self-powered devices, which will have a remote reading capability (telemetry), which should be launched next year," Kiran Vohra, CEO and director, Forbes Marshall, said.
Mr Vohra added that they are also working on smaller, individual home use meters. Commercial meters are priced around Rs. 20,000. Field trials of the small meters are currently on, Naushad Forbes, director, Forbes Marshall, said.
Forbes Marshall has recently bagged a Rs. 4 crore project from seven cities in Rajasthan where on a turnkey basis, they will supply the metering systems. Water is charged, whether for industrial or domestic use, at a standard rate since the meters are usually not reliable.
Mr Forbes said they are targeting a 10 per cent share of the Rs. 4,000 crore potential saving possible for domestic industry in energy conservation through process steam alone. With the quotas on textiles set to be lifted from January 1, 05, the textile sector is a major sector looking at reducing input costs.