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.
Across Indian cities, families still plan their day around uncertain water supply schedules, highlighting the need for smarter, more reliable systems.
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 few could afford, his team began building solutions using readily available computer components and software simple enough for operators to use.
But convincing people was often harder than building the technology itself.
One of the company’s earliest breakthroughs came in the early 1990s while working with ONGC.
Anil Agrawal, Founder & CEO of Cimcon, has worked on building systems that help cities monitor and manage essential infrastructure more efficiently.
Several oil wells were located in remote regions, and operators often discovered breakdowns only after production had already been affected.
Cimcon developed a monitoring system that could send alerts whenever a well stopped operating and provide remote production data.
The project became known as the ‘speaking wells’ project.
“For the first time, the well could tell you when something was wrong,” Agrawal says.
What began as a solution for oil wells soon revealed a larger opportunity. The same technology could help monitor electricity networks, water systems and other public infrastructure spread across vast geographies.
From oil wells to water networks
A few years later, that opportunity arrived in the hills around Dehradun.
Water distribution in the region depended heavily on manual operations. Pumps and valves located in remote areas had to be operated by workers travelling long distances, often in harsh weather conditions.
If someone failed to reach a pumping station on time, entire communities could face disruptions.
The challenge pushed Cimcon into the water sector. Using automation, the company enabled pumps, reservoirs and valves to be monitored and controlled remotely.
What once depended on manual intervention could now be managed through connected systems.
The success of those early projects laid the foundation for what would eventually become one of Cimcon’s largest areas of work: helping cities and communities manage water more efficiently.
Over time, the company expanded into drinking water networks, irrigation systems, electrical distribution and smart lighting projects across India.
Yet the core idea remained unchanged — make essential services more reliable.
“Wastage is one part of the story,” says Agrawal. “The real need has always been reliability.”
Giving cities a digital nervous system
To understand how Cimcon’s systems work, Rajnish Dashottar, Acting Director and technology expert at the company, offers a simple analogy.
“If we take a city’s infrastructure, it is just like a digital nervous system,” he explains.
“Just as the human body uses nerves to send information to the brain, we install intelligent sensors and communication devices across water supply schemes, pumping stations, reservoirs, street lights and other outdoor assets.”
IoT sensors track water flow, pressure, and levels in real time, sending data to a central system that detects leaks and failures early for quick action.
These devices continuously collect information and send it to a central command centre where operators can monitor an entire network in real time.
Depending on the project, sensors track water pressure, flow rates, reservoir levels, energy consumption and water quality indicators such as pH, chlorine levels and turbidity.
This constant stream of information gives authorities something many cities historically lacked, visibility.
“Earlier, cities were running almost blind because there were no sensors and no data,” Agrawal explains.
Now, operators can see how much water is being supplied, where it is going, whether the quality meets standards and whether any part of the network is under stress.
If a pipeline develops a leak, pressure levels immediately drop.
“That allows us to pinpoint leakages quickly and understand how much water is being lost,” says Dashottar.
The same data can also be used to predict equipment failures before they occur, helping authorities fix problems before residents are affected.
Saving water, energy and time
Water management is closely linked to energy consumption.
Every day, utilities use massive pumps to move water across cities, fill reservoirs and maintain pressure within networks. If these systems operate inefficiently, they consume significantly more electricity than necessary.
“These pumps need to operate at the right speed and under the right conditions,” explains Agrawal. “If they don’t, energy consumption increases dramatically.”
By monitoring equipment performance and optimising operations, Cimcon helps utilities reduce unnecessary energy usage.
The company’s smart lighting projects follow a similar principle.
Street lights can be monitored remotely, switched on and off automatically and dimmed during low-traffic hours without compromising public safety.
According to Cimcon, these interventions have collectively helped save more than 2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity across various projects while reducing operational costs for local authorities.
The impact people feel every day
While the technology itself may be invisible to most people, its impact is often deeply personal.
In rural communities, reliable tap water means women and girls no longer spend hours every day fetching water from distant sources.
“Many villages had never seen water in the tap,” says Agrawal.
The time saved can be used for education, work and family responsibilities. Access to cleaner water can also improve health outcomes and reduce exposure to unsafe sources.
The impact is equally significant in urban areas.
A central control system acts as the ‘digital nervous system’ of a city, enabling operators to track and manage water infrastructure remotely.
Across Indian cities, millions of households still organise their schedules around limited water supply windows. Families maintain storage tanks, run pumps and constantly worry about availability.
The long-term goal, Agrawal says, is to enable dependable 24×7 water supply systems where residents no longer have to structure their lives around infrastructure limitations.
Beyond homes, the technology is also supporting irrigation networks, helping farmers receive water more reliably and reducing the risk of crop losses caused by inconsistent supply.
Looking towards smarter and more resilient cities
As artificial intelligence becomes more accessible, Cimcon is now exploring technologies such as predictive maintenance, flood forecasting, digital twin platforms and AI-driven infrastructure management.
Dashottar explains that these tools can transform vast amounts of operational data into actionable insights, helping authorities predict demand, anticipate failures and improve decision-making.
For Agrawal, however, the future is not really about technology.
From rural villages to expanding cities, smarter water systems are reducing manual dependence and helping ensure more reliable access to clean water.
It is about making essential services so dependable that people barely notice them.
“The ideal state is when you don’t have to think about water, electricity or lighting,” he says. “They simply work.”
As India continues to urbanise and climate pressures place increasing demands on infrastructure, that vision may prove more important than ever.
Because sometimes the smartest cities are not the ones with the most technology. They are the ones where people can trust that when they turn on a tap, switch on a light or water a field, the systems behind them will do their job.
All images courtesy Cimcon team
