Suresh Patil retired as a regional bank manager in 2006, planning to travel. Instead he spent his first pension cheque on a water filter for his ancestral village, where children were routinely sick from contaminated wells.
He soon realised a filter was the easy part; keeping it working was hard. So he designed a model where each village forms a water committee, charges a small fee per can and pays a local operator.
Self-sustaining by design
Jal Mitra Trust now supports 300 villages. More than 90 percent of the plants are fully run and maintained by the communities themselves, many by women’s self-help groups.
Retirement gave me time. Villages gave me purpose. I think I got the better deal.
Now 80, Suresh still visits a village every week. “A project is successful,” he says, “when nobody remembers who started it.”
