India Is Drowning in Its Own Wastewater. These Two IIT Bombay Engineers Decided to Turn It Back Into a Resource.
India generates 72,000 million litres of wastewater every day. It treats 28 percent of it. The other 72 percent flows, untreated, into rivers, lakes, and land. Amrit Nayak and Krunal Patel think the problem is not the water — it is the architecture of how treatment gets built. Their company, Indra Water, is betting that the same logic that transformed automobile manufacturing can do the same for water. It is a large bet. The early evidence is compelling.
At one of Mumbai’s most iconic landmarks, standing since 1903, almost no water goes to waste. At the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, systems recovering close to 99 percent of wastewater — and returning more than 90 percent of it back into daily operations — were built by Indra Water, a startup co-founded by Amrit Nayak and Krunal Patel. The two describe their approach as the “Henry Ford moment” of water treatment: the belief that a sector long defined by one-off, heavily customised projects can be reimagined as a standardised, scalable industry.
But to understand why that shift matters, it helps to understand the scale of what remains broken.
The Water We Throw Away
In December 2024, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment stood before a national workshop and said what she has been saying for years: India faces significant water scarcity driven by urbanisation, industrial growth, and climate change, and “wastewater reuse can be a key part of the strategy to address these concerns.” Her organisation’s report, released the same day, put the numbers plainly. Of the 72,000 million litres of urban wastewater India generates daily, a mere 28 percent undergoes treatment. The rest — 72 percent — flows directly into rivers, lakes, and land.
This is not a new problem. For centuries, wetlands and rivers absorbed what cities produced. Industrialisation broke that balance. India lost nearly 30 percent of its natural wetlands in three decades. Chennai lost 90 percent of its wetlands between 1970 and 2015. Mumbai lost 71 percent. Bengaluru, 56 percent. The treatment infrastructure built to replace those natural systems was designed for compliance, not resource recovery — land-intensive, customised for every project, slow to replicate. Every new plant started from scratch. The architecture itself became the bottleneck.
Two Engineers, One Inconvenient Observation
Amrit Nayak grew up with an interest in clean energy systems and advanced engineering. Krunal Patel grew up with something more direct: his father ran a chemicals business, and he had been exposed to industrial water pollution since childhood. Between them, they brought a technical instinct and a lived awareness of the problem they would eventually decide to solve.
The two met while studying at the University of Washington in Seattle, where water infrastructure is central to urban planning. What they found when they looked at wastewater treatment plants surprised them — not the technology, but the logic.
“Coming from an automotive background, we were surprised by how customised every water treatment plant was. In automobiles, standardisation creates efficiency, scalability and cost advantages. We began wondering whether water treatment could follow a similar path.” — Amrit Nayak, Co-founder & CEO
They built a prototype during their Master’s programme. They realised the impact would be largest in India. They returned — supported initially by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Bombay, and KJ Somaiya Institute — and founded what became Indra Water.
How the Technology Works
Most treatment systems use chemicals, membranes or biological processes to remove pollutants. Indra Water uses electricity. By running an electric current through wastewater, the technology disrupts the molecular structure of pollutants — breaking the chemical bonds that hold them together until they can no longer exist in their original form.
At the heart of this is ElectroX, the company’s proprietary electrochemical platform, which combines six treatment functions within a single reactor. Most biological treatment processes take hours. Pharmaceutical wastewater can take days. Indra Water processes comparable streams in approximately 200 seconds.
Faster treatment means less time, less land, less construction, lower capital cost. And compact means something else: it can be manufactured rather than built on site.
“Because our treatment process is much faster, equipment becomes smaller. Once equipment becomes smaller, it can be standardised. Once it can be standardised, it can be manufactured at scale. That’s what fundamentally changes the economics.” — Amrit Nayak
The Numbers
For facilities that have already invested in treatment infrastructure to meet Pollution Control Board and Ministry of Environment regulations, replacing systems entirely is rarely viable. Indra Water installs its reactors upstream — treating wastewater before it reaches existing systems, not instead of them. Retrofit deployments can free up 40–60 percent of treatment footprints while improving treatment performance.
For new installations, the reductions are more significant: footprint reduction of up to 70 percent for sewage treatment projects, and 80–90 percent for industrial wastewater projects. A conventional facility treating 24 million litres per day may require 75,000 square metres. Indra Water delivers the same capacity in approximately 14,800 square metres.
The business behind the technology has attracted serious capital. In January 2024, Indra raised $4 million in a Series A round co-led by Mela Ventures and Emerald Technology Ventures, with participation from Peak Sustainability Ventures and The Climate Angels. Annual revenue stood at ₹12.2 crore as of March 2025. The company had 63 employees as of early 2025, reflecting 134 percent year-on-year headcount growth. These are not the numbers of a company still searching for product-market fit.
