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Even as a child, Karunakara M Reddy understood the travails of rural India in getting safe drinking water.
He would see womenfolk in his village in Andhra Pradesh’s Mehbubnagar district trudge miles to fetch a pot of drinking water.
He also saw how people in his village frequently fell ill because of water-borne diseases.
He knew then that availability of safe drinking water would be a major problem in India for decades to come.
Biz opportunityMany years later, in 1998, armed with an MBA and in his first job, he realised how drinking water offered a business opportunity.
Reddy, who had joined a soft-drink MNC in Hyderabad, had been asked to help launch the company’s first mineral-water plant.
That same year, the 23-year-old executive quit the job, which was paying him about ₹60,000 a month.
With an investment of ₹37,000, he set up an office to provide safe drinking water at an affordable price. “We started off with importing and later assembling water purifying units, which then cost ₹27,000 each. We sold 27 units in the first six months and ended the first year with ₹6 lakh revenue,” he recalls.
Today, the company, Smaat India, has annual sales of ₹120 crore, with about 900 employees and a factory that produces 300 water purifying units a month.
“For me, it is not business alone. Somehow the urge to provide safe and affordable drinking water to rural India has been there in me from my childhood,” the 39-year-old Chairman and Managing Director says.
Smaat sells water solutions to 33 countries, covering 18 innovative technologies developed in-house.
“These include reverse osmosis, ozone filtration, solar ozone evaporation and demineralisation.
“The objective of the innovation is to reduce filtration cost to ensure safe drinking water at affordable costs,” he says.
Innovative productsOne of its innovative products is a mobile treatment unit to provide drinking water to the masses during floods or natural calamities.
The ₹1.3-crore unit is mounted on a specially designed truck that can be moved around to deliver 2,000 litres per hour.
“What is unique is that it packs the water in small pouches automatically. It can produce 5,000 pouches an hour.
“The pouches come out seamlessly. These units are doing well in West Bengal and Jharkhand,” says Reddy.
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