An 18-month pilot in South Zone

The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board has started an AI- and robotics-led water management pilot in the city's South Zone. It runs for the next one and a half years. The MoU was signed on Wednesday.

Four organisations are implementing it: SmartTerra, Solinas, the Villgro Innovations Foundation, and Titan Company Ltd.'s Design Impact Award Programme.

What it's meant to do

BWSSB chairperson Manjula N described the setup as AI and robotic systems monitoring the city's water supply infrastructure — robots inspecting pipelines for leaks and defects, with real-time alerts going to officials. The stated goal is to "reduce non-revenue water and improve efficiency".

Non-revenue water is water a utility puts into the network but never bills for — lost to leaks, theft, or metering errors. For most large Indian water utilities it is the single biggest source of waste, which is why it's the metric this pilot is being judged on.

Why robots rather than sensors alone

Fixed sensors tell you a district is losing pressure. They don't tell you which metre of which pipe has the defect. In-pipe robotic inspection is aimed at that gap: locating the specific fault rather than inferring a general one, so crews dig once instead of speculatively.

That's the theory. Whether it survives contact with Bengaluru's actual pipe network — much of it old, incompletely mapped, and under traffic — is what the next 18 months will establish.

What we don't know yet

The announcement is thin on specifics. There's no published figure for the pilot's cost, no stated baseline for current non-revenue water losses in South Zone, no target percentage, and no detail on how many kilometres of pipeline the robots will actually cover. Without a baseline, "success" at the end of 18 months will be whatever BWSSB decides to call it. Worth watching for those numbers when the first review lands.

Source: The Hindu