This is expected to further generate awareness on water conservation and open new avenues for sustainable water solutions such as waste water treatment and solar pumps and help them become a mainstay.

What is your strategy to expand business for the existing range of pumps?
More feet on street is a proven strategy for every organisation dealing with such products. This means network expansion. Particularly in less explored and unexplored markets. Also, supporting the distribution network with necessary tools for business development is the key.

What are the challenges you see are faced by the industry in dealing with upcoming demand and supply?
Effective water management has become anecessity in the country today. While individuals and companies have become more conscious to the India’s water-stressed condition, traditional pumps are still being used ineffectively. Intelligent pumps are the need of the hour to explore alternative means of procuring, conserving and reusing water. These pumps have a host of domestic, commercial and industrial applications such as pressure management, cooling and lubrication, Water and wastewater treatment etc. In groundwater depleted areas, they can be used to transport &convert surface water into treated water.

Most people have limited awareness of these pumps and its capabilities. They need to understand the interconnected nature of technology and water efficiency. The cost of such intelligent pumps also becomea major hinderance in adoption. However, they are profitable in the long run through their extended life cycle, overall efficiency and minimal maintenance requirements.

What is your expectation from the industry bodies and policy makers to capitalise the present market?
We believe that a unified central ministry for water management such as the Jal Shakti Ministry is a much-needed step. This is expected to further generate awareness on water conservation and open new avenues for sustainable water solutions such as waste water treatment and solar pumps and help them become a mainstay.This would have a ripple effect and aid in increasing the adoption rate of intelligent pumps, and further drive innovation, thereby, helping us create new cutting-edge solutions to improve the water scenario in the country without compromising on energy efficiency & reliability aspects.

What is your company’s outlook for 2022?
Grundfos has always been focused on providing affordable surface and groundwater solutions for the Indian subcontinent and have been looking at ways to pioneer and improve the quality of our pumps for the benefit of our customers. Recently, we announced our growth plans to become a Rs 1,000 crore company in the next 5 years. Solar pumps and digitally connected solutions such as e-pumps and Demand Driven Distribution is expected to be major growth drivers for us globally. We will continue our investments in the country on an annual basis to fuel this growth.

As a leader in sustainable solutions, we also aspire to half our CO2 emissions by 2025. So far, we have managed to reduce our energy consumption by 11% and water usage by 10%. In addition to this, we are also working towards providing safe drinking water to 300 million people and save 50 billion m3 of water by 2030 through our solutions.n

Saravanan Panneer Selvam, General Manager, Grundfos India