These IIT Kanpur Grads Harness AI to Fix India’s Water Woes

In a country where water often flows unseen until it runs dry, Kritsnam Technologies is on a mission to make every drop count. Founded in 2015 by IIT Kanpur alumni K Sri Harsha, Vinay Chataraju and Prudhvi Sagar, the deep-tech startup has built an in-house ultrasonic smart water meter, alongside AI-driven platforms that help industries, utilities, and households measure, manage, and conserve water.

The company’s origins trace back to Harsha’s master’s thesis at IIT Kanpur. His research involved exploring what makes a river perennial and the evolution of water resource management across the globe since the 1930s. 

“What struck me was how undervalued water is, not just in India, but worldwide. No one was investing in efficiencies for river, canal, industrial, or household water supply. That’s where we saw an opportunity to intervene,” Harsha recalled.

Harsha and Vinay envisioned moving people from being passive water users to active water custodians. “A custodian is someone who thinks about how to use water efficiently, and how to put it back into the system responsibly,” said Harsha. “That transformation is what we want to bring about.” In 2015, Kritsnam was born out of that conviction.

Building in a Deep-Tech Desert

Being a deep-tech startup in India came with its own hurdles, as many investors here didn’t fully understand deep tech, Harsha said. 

“For the first five years, we depended almost entirely on government grants. It was individual angel investors, people with technical and industry experience, who understood what we were building and kept us going.”

The perseverance paid off. Today, Kritsnam’s solutions digitise more than 2 billion litres of water every day across 15,000 locations in India. Its flagship products, Dhaara Smart (for enterprises and utilities) and Dhaara Pulse (for households and communities), are reshaping how water is measured and managed.

Kritsnam’s journey has also been buoyed by support from Hyderabad’s innovation ecosystem, particularly T-Hub and T-Works. “Being a hardware company, you need prototyping and testing support, and T-Works has been invaluable,” said Harsha. “T-Hub, meanwhile, has given us market connections and opened up funding opportunities. Without that ecosystem, our journey would have been slower.”

Industry First, Consumers Next

For the first half of its journey, Kritsnam focused on B2B solutions. “We realised early on that industries and listed companies had both the need and the ability to pay for accurate water accounting,” explained Chataraju. “From 2015 to 2020, we worked with governments and industries. Then in 2020, we made a strategic pivot to B2B, driven by rising regulations and the ESG movement.”

That strategy helped Kritsnam work with over 200 major enterprises, many of whom underestimated their own water use by as much as four to five times. Recalling such an example, Harsha said: “One large edible oil company thought it was using 3.5 lakh litres of water per day. When we installed meters, we found they were actually consuming 22 lakh litres daily, just from two borewells. This is not an exception; 90% of our customers discover they use far more than they imagined.”

Now, Kritsnam Technologies is making its second pivot: to households. 

With Dhaara Pulse, which comes with in-built 4G connectivity and a WhatsApp-first interface, Kritsnam is bringing water intelligence directly into homes. “The idea is simple,” said Harsha, adding, “your water should talk to you. Every morning, it [the meter] analyses your usage, tells you when leaks may have occurred, and nudges you towards becoming a better water manager, without you even realising it.”

A Market Ripe for Change

The context for Kritsnam’s mission could not be starker. India is home to 18% of the world’s population, but it accounts for only 4% of the world’s global water resources. A 2019 report by NITI Aayog estimated that the urban population will reach over 600 million by 2030, and Indians still face extreme water stress, with nearly 200,000 people dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water.

Storage is another challenge: The Central Water Commission’s study projects that the average annual per capita availability will drop from 1,486 cubic meters in 2021 to 1,367 cubic meters in 2031. Availability below 1,700 cubic meters indicates water stress, and below 1,000 cubic meters indicates water scarcity.

Against this backdrop, technologies like Kritsnam’s can play a transformative role.

Harnessing AI for Water

At the heart of Kritsnam’s offering is its proprietary ultrasonic sensing technology. “From there, the data gets communicated through cellular networks and into the cloud, where we run mathematical analysis for enterprises,” Harsha explained. “On the consumer side, we combine usage patterns with behavioural data and feed it into large language models (LLMs). The AI layer, what we call Assistive Water Intelligence (AWI), converts raw data into simple, conversational insights delivered over WhatsApp.”

The company is also experimenting with gamification. “We’re working on something called Water Coins,” Harsha revealed. “If you reduce your water consumption by even 1%, you earn coins that can be redeemed for discounts on sustainability products. It’s about rewarding good behaviour, because regulation alone won’t change habits.”

Changing Mindsets, One Drop at a Time

The founders are ambitious about scaling. From 10,000 active devices today they aim to reach 500,000 to a million monitoring points across India and beyond in the next five years, said Chataraju. “The scale will come from both enterprise and domestic markets.”

Harsha, however, pointed out that perception remains a challenge, even though the hardware is now affordable. “Water is so undervalued that people don’t see why they should measure it. Unlike electricity, there’s no immediate cost incentive. So we have to make water management personal, visible, and rewarding, more like a fitness tracker than a utility meter.”

Despite the hurdles, the founders are optimistic. They have seen industries cut water use by 30-50% within a year with their aid. “People take pride in their progress, educating peers, and becoming champions of conservation,” said Harsha, adding that people just need the right nudge.

“If we can shift even a fraction of households and enterprises from being water users to custodians, the impact will be transformative, not just for India, but for other water-stressed regions globally,” added Chataraju.

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