About Us

Drinking Water BACKGROUND

Paul Polak, with his long career in the social sector was intrigued by two questions — what makes poor people poor? And what can they do about their poverty? After 30 long years in the social sector, in various countries and dealing with people at grassroots, Paul realized that developing grass root entrepreneurs was one of the solutions to mitigate poverty. With this objective Paul sowed the seeds of Spring Health Water (India) Private Limited.

Some reports cited that lack of access to clean water and sanitation killed children at a rate equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every four hours(a). So when Paul conceptualized Spring Health Water (India) Private Limited (henceforth referred to as SH) as an enterprise, the idea was to implement a radically affordable, decentralized delivery system, to provide safe and affordable drinking water to a potential 200 million people who earn less than $2 a day.

The major challenge for Paul was to sell water to villagers of Odisha. Villagers usually consumed water from common resources such as open wells, ponds and hand- pumps. Another overarching challenge was overcoming class and caste barriers and supplying safe drinking water at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). Cultural beliefs and faith associated with water required triumphing over behavioral, social and cultural biases. Lastly scaling up the venture and making it commercially viable required overcoming all kinds of biases and also convincing investors of the potential returns.

With this context, Paul designed a for-profit venture to sell safe drinking water in the remotest and poorest corners of Odisha. Paul was the Chairman and his team comprising Jacob Mathews (CEO, Spring Health) and Kishan Nanavati (COO, Spring Health) registered Spring Health as a company and started the pilot project in the Khurda district of Odisha. CONTINUE TO READ

Spring Health is currently operating in Khurda, Jajpur, Puri and Dhenkanal districts covering 200 villages.

Spring Health is managed by its board and CEO Kishan Nanavati and a lean operational team on the ground.

Jacob Mathew: Director

Jacob is a design entrepreneur and has co founded several design led business in consulting, manufacturing and retail. As a consultant he has worked with many Indian and global retail conglomerates. He is currently CEO of Industree Foundation and is Design Principal at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology where he leads the Impact Edge Lab. Jacob has also served as CEO of Spring Health from 2011 to 2013. He advices several startups, social enterprise coalitions and is a thought leader in design for Impact and serves on the boards of several listed companies.

Kishan Nanavati: CEO

Kishan Nanavati has a wealth of experience in the Telecom sector that revolutionized communication in India. Kishan has worked in scale handling more than 25,000 retail points in mobile telecom retail and is pragmatic implementer of strategy in the field. Kishan has led Spring Health operations as COO from 2011 to 2013 and has been CEO since 2013. Kishan can be found most days hands on in the field and has a very bottom up way of functioning.

Patricia M Dinneen, PhD: Chair, Archdiocesan Social Justice Ministry, Boston, USA

Pat Dinneen is involved in multiple philanthropic, entrepreneurial and impact investing initiatives, and serves on the boards of Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Community Fund, Catholic Impact Investing Collaborative, Spring Health India, AIM Impact Fund and several others. Her career has included investor and director in funds and enterprises in Private Equity and Impact Investing in Emerging Markets, operational and managerial positions in Aerospace and Telecoms Industries, research and advisory roles in Financial Consulting, founder of several Corporate Ventures, budget examiner in Government Service. She holds a PhD degree from MIT in Economics and Technology.

Audrey Selian: Rianta Capital and Artha Network

Audrey serves as Director of Artha Impact (Rianta Capital Zurich), an impact investment initiative under the auspices of a dedicated advisory to the Singh Family Trust. Her focus has been on the deployment of private equity finance to high impact businesses serving the underserved in India across various sectors including agriculture, health, energy, water, education and livelihoods. Audrey is founder of an online impact investment platform designed to tackle the economics of discovery and due diligence for social enterprises. Through its associated vehicle Artha Networks Inc., the platform has been licensed to a major development bank and is actively in testing in other sectors and geographies. She is also co-founder of Impact for Breakfast, an informal ‘breakfast club’ network comprised of over 2,400 investment advisors that is now active in 15+ cities. She holds degrees from the Fletcher School at Tufts University (PhD, MALD), The London School of Economics (MSc) and Wellesley College (BA). In 2003, she was a doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Stephan Reckie: Founder Angelus Funding

Stephan is the Co-founder and CEO of Angelus Funding, a trust-based global network of angel investors, who actively evaluate a wide range of innovative and impactful investment opportunities. Also the Co-Founder of Edge of Space, a company focused on exciting space-based projects including developing space STEM based educational kits for students around the world. Prior to starting Edge of Space, Stephan served in several international executive roles including: COO of DigiLink Software, a China-based embedded video solutions developer, and the Director of North American Sales at India-based Ittiam Systems. As the founding Director of EMEA Operations for Telogy Networks, his company was acquired by Texas Instruments in 1999. Stephan is a “professional” volunteer for several impactful organizations and an active community leader.

Advisory Board

Kathie Michie: US Liaison – Marketing and Board Relations

Kathie’s career includes work in both non-profit and for-profit corporate leadership roles and has implemented many high-profile, strategic technology programs and projects over her career. Her expertise is in strategic planning, implementation and marketing. As a consultant now, she manages integration projects for merging companies, problem-solves and motivates teams. Kathie earned her MBA in Finance, is an active Certified Scrum Master and Project Management Professional, and learner for life. Kathie had the privilege working with Paul Polak sharing his passion of helping others help themselves and making a difference in the world. Paul has passed his vision on to Kathie and Stephan to carry on Transform Poverty Global and Transform Energy. Her world travels include a trip to India with Paul and Stephan in late 2018. She is devoted to her family and friends and lives in Colorado, USA.

Deepak Sakena: Expansion and Marketing Advisor

A pharmacist with extensive experience in Social Marketing of WASH products and development of Large Scale Public Health & WASH Programs through Public-Private partnership. Currently serves as the Director-Partnerships at Watershed Holdings Pte.Ltd / Happytap, part of a young & dynamic team that is working to fulfill their exciting goal of helping over 10 Million people wash their hands regularly by 2024. Retired from Unilever in June 2018 after serving for 9 years as “Head of Partnerships & Emerging Markets -Global Water Business” responsible for forging sustainable partnerships with Global NGO’s, MFI’s and other outreach agencies to reach low-income households in India, Soth & Soth East Asia and Africa. I was also been involved in forging scientific partnerships around Household water purification. He also led the development of inventive micro-financing solutions that enabled poor households to acquire the household water treatment products they desired and manufactures to access new markets at the base of the pyramid.

Previous Board Members

Sanjay Kalra

Sanjay is the former head of US$ 2 billion, Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Sathyam one of the large IT companies of india. Sanjay guides the company with the wealth of experience he has in the corporate world and is an important link to people and projects that are useful for the success of Spring Health. Sanjay served on the board of Spring Health for several years before moving to the advisory board.

Daniele Lantagne

Daniele is one of the foremost experts in the world on water safety through chlorination. Daniele has worked for many years at Atlanta’s Centre for Disease Control CDC and has been a roving expert setting up safe drinking water facilities in failed states and disaster struck localities across the world. She is currently with Tufts University and is a key technology advisor to Spring Health. She also served on the board of directors of Spring Health from 2011 to 2017.

Legal Advisors

Roopa Dorasamy of Narsappa and Dorasamy has helped us in navigating the legal aspects of setting up and accepting investments into Spring Health.

Covington and Burling helped structure the international investments into Spring Health

Auditors / Accounting

KG Acharya and associates are our auditors and advise us on statutory and governance issues in addition to their role as auditors.