This AI-Powered ‘Digital Nervous System’ Is Helping Cities Save Water & Energy |
Before the morning tea is brewed and the school rush begins, many Indian households are already thinking about water.
Has the supply arrived? Is the overhead tank full? Should the pump be switched on now before the water stops flowing?
Across cities, families continue to plan their day around uncertain supply schedules. In villages, many women still spend hours fetching water where piped connections remain unreliable. For millions, access to water is not as simple as turning on a tap.
For a country that is building smart cities, these everyday struggles reveal a quieter challenge: how do you make essential services like water and electricity more reliable while reducing waste?
The answer, increasingly, lies in data.
Over the last few decades, Ahmedabad-based Cimcon has been helping cities, towns and villages do exactly that.
Using sensors, automation and artificial intelligence, the company enables authorities to monitor water networks, pumping stations, street lights and other public infrastructure in real time.
The goal isn't simply to make cities smarter but to ensure that a leaking pipeline is detected before thousands of litres are lost, a malfunctioning pump is fixed before households run dry, and public infrastructure works efficiently enough to save both water and energy.
Behind these solutions is a journey that began nearly four decades ago, when automation itself was still a foreign concept in much of India.
Building automation solutions before India was ready
When Anil Agrawal returned to India in 1988 after studying advanced automation systems in the United States, he was driven by a simple question: how could technology solve real-world problems back home?
Today, Agrawal serves as the Founder and CEO of Cimcon, but back then, the landscape looked very different.
"There was very limited automation. Everything was manual," he recalls.
Most utilities relied on paperwork, field inspections and endless phone calls. Technology was expensive, and many organisations viewed automation with suspicion.
Some feared it would replace jobs. Others simply couldn't imagine software solving everyday infrastructure challenges.
"The first task was to reduce the cost and make automation economical," says Agrawal.
Instead of creating expensive systems that only a........