Robots Are Crawling Through Indias Pipelines

They are helping save lives, and mitigating rampant pollution of water bodies

- Akhil George

Robots don’t need to know how to dance, or do black flips, or play chess against grandmasters to be useful. Sometimes simple tech with just the right capabilities can do wonders – like stopping rampant water pollution.

India’s water bodies are in an abysmal condition. The sheer scale of the problem forced two California-based techies, Asim Bhalerao and Nidhi Jain, to give up their plush lives in the US six years ago and return to India and set up a robotics firm in Pune called Fluid Robotics.

One of the crucial problems they wanted to solve was related to the fact that municipalities did not know where any of their underground pipeline networks were, making it impossible to repair and maintain them effectively. “This was resulting in more than 80% of sewage that was generated in Indian cities being discharged into the environment untreated, impacting urban lakes, rivers, and coastlines,” says Bhalerao, noting that about 50 billion litres of raw sewage is discharged into the environment every single day in India.