While preparing for the IIT-JEE exams, Divyanshu Kumar's goal was to study mechanical engineering at IIT-Kanpur. But it wasn't a dream. He missed out on admission by one mark and had to join IIT Madras instead.

But that dream never materialised, he says. Five years of study at IIT-Madras, with a BTech in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Product Design, led him to become an entrepreneur and launch two start-ups while still in college.

The first start-up, Involve, started in his second year, was to equip students from higher grades to teach and mentor juniors in low-income families through a nine-month fellowship.

In his final year of college, Divyanshu began work on a project to develop a robot to clean manholes and septic tanks.

"With regard to the water and sanitation sector, as someone who loves technology, I found the project very interesting as it can solve a lot of problems in the sector. We received an award from the Prime Minister and I started thinking if this is a good time to take it beyond a college project, "says Divanshu Kumar.

It was this idea that led to the birth of Solinas Integrity, a start-up emerging from IIT-Madras that develops deep, climate-tech solutions with sustainability at the core.

From a college project to a start-up

Solinas began as a college project. Kumar recalls his team presenting the project to manual scavengers in Chennai.

"I still remember them laughing after the performance. It pained me to see them mocking the technology we have developed. They asked if we had really seen a manhole or a septic tank being cleaned, and I realized that not having seen it was an understatement. They showed us how their work affected their nails and skin and asked us to join them at a cleaning site in the middle of the night, "he recalls.

It was only after going to the site with them that I got the overwhelming excitement of finding products that fit the task.

The initial prototype was a bio-propulsion-based motion robot. It was suitable to go inside the septic tank where the density of the liquid and the viscosity were low. But the team realised that the solution would not work in manholes and deep septic tanks. This led to the production of a new prototype that worked a little better.

In 2018, Kumar and his professor brainstormed what to do next - whether to leave the prototype as a college project or take it forward as a startup. Around this time, Moinak Banerjee joined as a co-founder and they started building a team.

Kumar points out that cleaning septic tanks is a problem in water sanitation management in cities. Water and sanitation are interrelated, and all utilities, including water pipelines, drainage systems, septic tanks, and sewage pipelines, are underground. Their inspection and cleaning is not entirely manual; even today, at times, the work requires human intervention.

The idea was to take advantage of the technology to see where the problem was and be able to do it quickly. If the wastewater overflows multiple times; where did the block occur? Why it happened? Are there any design issues? The team concluded that these challenges can be met by leveraging data and robotics.

Far-reaching technological solutions

HomeSep, manufactured by Solinas Integrity, comes as a combo of India's first septic tank and manhole cleaning robot, cleaning blades, a suction mechanism, and a storage and transportation option.

After this, the team developed Endobot - an "endoscopy" robot for all kinds of pipelines - water, sewage and drainage. It was a model that sent the robot into the system and gave it accurate data to check for damages, falls, and where exactly the fault was.

Since most water supply pipelines are between 80mm and 200mm wide, the Endo 90 can go into pipes with a diameter of up to 90mm. Endo90 is already being used in 12 cities for pipeline inspections.

"Another challenge has arisen in front of us - how to clean the horizontal sewage pipelines that are lying blocked?For this, we are developing the Rehabilitation Boat or R-Bot with a grant from ACT.This will be a game changer for us as so far there has been no proper solution to clean the horizontal systems, "Kumar explains.

ACT for the Environment's grant will help Solinas accelerate the development and deployment of R-BOT with municipalities and O & M (Operations and Maintenance) players.

Along with these innovations, Swasth, a digital cloud AI dashboard for conditional validation and data management, has also been launched to identify Solinas Integrity, Defect Coding, Defect Grading, and Risk Assessment. It offers GIS tagging of fault location and pipeline auditing.

The data collected by Endobot is processed and a customized report is generated on the Swast Dashboard. These micro-level statistics will help in predicting challenges and taking timely action. Kumar says.

Swasth has aligned with two private companies and the startup is expected to expand its client base soon.

"We have given the government free access to a couple of places, but since it is a technology-driven solution, the acquisition will take time," Kumar notes.

Benefits of privatisation

He pointed out that privatization has now brought plans to operate and repair some of the pipelines. So, he believes that this is the right time for Solinas Integrity to scale up its efforts.

"Privatisation has been very useful for us because they would be very interested if they know that there is a technology that can reduce their labour cost and come up with data.

Secondly, the government's investment in policies like manual scavenging, Jal Jeevan Mission, Amat Mission and educating manual scavengers is very important. Besides, the sector is also seeing huge investment in infrastructure development, "he explains.

As far as social impact is concerned, apart from helping eliminate manual scavenging altogether, Solinas' robotic products also help in identifying contamination, detecting specific problems and offering solutions.

"In Hubballi, we worked closely with L & T to focus on identifying pollution, leakages and blockages. 1,000 urban slum families, who had been without water for almost two years, have finally got drinking water. Technology like this can transform cities as every kilometre of testing can save about 400,000 to 600,000 litres of water, "he explains.

Solinas has deployed its operations in more than 15 cities in nine states. Tenders have also been floated to work directly with the government. So far, seven rounds of funding have been completed.

"Our main focus is India, but we have already started penetrating the Middle East and Southeast Asian markets. One of our scale strategies is to move from small portions of orders to larger ones. We are targeting more than one crore projects, "Kumar said.