Old problems, new solutions: Startups solving India's infrastructure problems

Varun Banka was with his friends at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2012 when he saw on the news that Delhi protesters were making demands on the government and aggressively fighting the police. The final-year engineering student knew that such situations arising from poor governance were not uncommon in India.

In response, he started a data company called SocialCops along with college mate Prukalpa Sankar to structure data that can then be used in civic and policing applications, such as predicting crime hotspots. But SocialCops is not quite the nonprofit startup it appears to be. The Delhi-based company clocks a revenue run rate of Rs 1 crore, earned from its partnerships with more than 150 Indian civic authorities, maternity centers and non-governmental organisations.

"There is just so much data, disorganised and unstructured, in files, folders, and records," said Banka, whose company has raised Rs 2 crore from Silicon Valley-based seed fund and incubator 500 Startups and Google VP, South East Asia Rajan Anandan. "When straitjacketed, (data) becomes easier and clearer for organisations to make use of it better and more successfully."

SocialCops expects to close its first round of institutional funding next month.



Amid the funding and hype for consumer-facing startups in the past two years, a silent army of entrepreneurs has emerged, armed with technologies to develop solutions for the country’s massive administrative, infrastructure and policing woes.

Realizing that these technologies that predict buyer behaviour could also be used to forecast things such as traffic and drought patterns, entrepreneurs targeting to improve the daily lives of Indians have successfully attracted the interests of institutional investors as well as government agencies. If there ever was a good time to startup in the ‘tech for good’ space, it is now, say entrepreneurs and investors.

The business model and the product or service offered are like two peas in a pod, and civic technology startups are no exception, say investors.

Big data and analytics are proving useful not only for common consumer purposes such as ad re-targeting and product customization, but also for crime prevention, aid mobility and optimizing infrastructure. Bengaluru-based water data company Nextdrop, for instance, allows valvemen to update residents on water availability. Over a dozen child safety device makers have mushroomed in the past year-and-half following a string of rapes in schools.

Karthee Madasamy, managing director of Qualcomm Ventures India, which has backed Birds Eye Technologies and MapMyIndia, pointed out that civic problems in India are centered on infrastructure and basic needs. "They are business opportunities that companies can monetize on if they manage to solve these problems," he said.

That is precisely what entrepreneurs like Ankit Mehta, cofounder and chief executive of Ideaforge, is doing, using drones. The Navi Mumbai-based company has sold more than 70 drones to police and defence forces. These unmanned devices were deployed in rescue operations after the earthquake in Nepal last month, the drowning of college students at the Beas River last year, and for crowd surveillance at the Jagannath Rath Yatra in Ahmedabad. "We will be touching multi-million dollars in revenue in the upcoming fiscal," said Mehta.

Meanwhile, affordable healthcare, rural education, and agricultural technology have cocooned themselves into fairly structured agendas, taking a seat in investor maps and paving the way for entrepreneurship in these spaces. The most important shift has been in the mindset of civic-tech entrepreneurs, say technology experts. Startups and investors alike have realised that the scope for scale is nipped when an entrepreneur is laser-focused on the product or service, ignoring the need for a well-planned business model.
While previously investing in these startups had been relegated to the realm of impact capital funds, this is no longer the case. "The role of an impact investor is to come in with ‘patient’ capital, which would let the entrepreneur crack a lot of the challenges in the business model to scale, and help them towards commercial capital," commented Varun Bhalla, investment associate at Khosla Impact.

In such a nascent industry, challenges remain - starting with the wider perception of these startups. "The for-profitand-social-good segment is still seen with a lot of skepticism in the society. Either you are for-profit company or an NGO - it’s so binary as that everything else is perceived as a marketing gimmick," said Vinod Chandrashekhar, Bengaluru head of DataKind, which helps social organizations make better use of big data.

"The challenges come when these ideas have to be transformed into a scalable product or service. This happens primarily due to fund constraints, hiring senior intellectual team and lack of support shown by city’s administration agencies to partner with such startups," said Ravi Khemani, cofounder and chief technology officer at Birds Eye Technologies, which runs traffic information application Traffline and public transport app Ridlr. The Mumbai-based startup, which has over a million users, raised an undisclosed sum in Series A funding from Matrix Partners and Qualcomm Ventures a year ago. "It feels like early days yet," said Karthik Reddy, managing partner of Blume Ventures. "Companies are improving customer stickiness, revenue models, and how to use data extensively. A lot of these segments could be massively useful and have hundred-milliondollar outcomes, but you don’t know what people are willing to pay for yet."