NextDrop: Using SMS to inform citizens when water would flow from municipal taps
Water. A basic amenity needed by all of us. Yet, in most towns and cities across the country, the municipal taps are unreliable. Water supply being sporadic in nature, thousands of people queue up in front of these taps not knowing when the water would flow. Households lose immense amounts of time waiting for water to arrive, with the costs borne disproportionately by women and by the poor. A group of interdisciplinary graduate students came together in this class to create a solution to the water problem. NextDrop provides households with accurate and timely information about local piped water delivery, over cell phones already widely in use in India. This information comes from water utility employees who call their interactive voice response system when they open valves to distribute water. These reports are used to generate real-time water availability updates and notifications 30-60 minutes in advance of water delivery. In addition, NextDrop uses crowd-sourcing to verify the accuracy of utility reports and create a feedback loop, introducing much-needed visibility for engineers in the water utility.
Source: https://www.thebetterindia.com/3604/nextdrop-sms-citizens-water-delivery/
