Just after Independence of India, the water usage per capita was at about 30 LPCD (Litres per capita per day). At present, it stands at about 135 LPCD on national average and the metropolitan cities including Bengaluru have crossed 250 LPCD. National statistics say, 90 LPCD is actually the most desirable number. The rise in this number is predominantly due to changing lifestyles and a mental condition of many people known as ‘False Abundance of Water’.

So, what is this ‘False Abundance of Water’? Most of the apartment dwellers, don’t even know from where the water is coming into the apartment and thus coming to their taps. They always tend to think there is enough water available and as a result overuse. They do not even know how many tankers come in per day and other critical details about water infrastructures in their apartment. This is why apartments are moving towards having 250 LPCD which is more than double of optimal numbers. How can this mental state of ‘False Abundance’ be broken?. One solution is making water a commodity and to be billed as per usages. BAF (Bengaluru Apartment Forum) data suggests that, any apartment going with meters for individual homes will see a 30% reduction in fresh water usage.

There are roughly 30000 apartment complexes in Bengaluru and only a countable number of them have installed Metering for water usage and charge the residents as per usage of water. There are a lot of challenges in installing water meters for individual flats in apartments. Main challenge comes from the fact that the flats in apartments have multiple inlets and installing a single meter would come as a real challenge. Apart from that, the plumbing rework is also very clumsy.

However, the technology has evolved and IoT and Ultrasonic Flow meters have found their place in solving this problem. Ultrasonic Flow meters do not need any plumbing modification as they clang on to pipes to estimate the flow. IoT sensors can be installed at multiple inlets and all the data from them can be aggregated towards the cloud storage / server for computing the total usage. This also gives a real time picture about water usage in any apartment to the managing committee.

Any commodity that can be metered can be policed as well. Any commodity with a price tag associated with it, will be used judiciously for sure. So now, it’s the right time to ‘meter and police’ the water usage in apartments and bring the per capita usage down to national standards.