Tapping the Market For Water in India is not easy, despite the apparent need:
After draining this town’s pool of drinking water recently, cleaners found drowned rats and bloated lizards. But at least, as is common at other storage tanks across this parched land in eastern India, there were no dead monkeys.Kaikaluru’s drinking water, filtered through sand from a nearby pond, is amber in color and alive with microbes. Even so, a survey of the town’s residents showed that half the people still prefer it to a sanitized version dispensed at a new store operated by a tiny Orange County, Calif., company, WaterHealth International Inc.
“The old water is free,” explains Dhana Lakshmi, a 43-year old mother and local resident. Daily, she walks past WaterHealth’s store to a community tap, rather than pay less than half a penny for the company’s five-gallon jug of purified water. Ms. Lakshmi says her family of five earns about 80 rupees a day, or about 40 cents per person. Most families that size go through about five gallons of water a day.