Rising Confidence in Cleaning

[box type=”shadow” ]India is set to be the world’s third largest economy with projected GDP at US$10,133 billion by 2030, and so is the cleaning industry with a pan-India potential of $150 billion. With Clean India Mission, river cleaning and smart cities projects, policy reforms and rising awareness happening altogether, cleaning today is one of the most fertile businesses of India. Suprita Anupam brings an account on the cleaning business potential in India.[/box]

AS RIGHTLY pointed out by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw during her interaction with Clean India Journal, “We have to be in a firefighting mode”; the Government at the helm has set the tone from “should” factor of cleaning to the “must” mode, irrespective of the nature of organisations – private, public or PPP.

India is a country where 60.2% population has no access to safe and private toilets, tier II and III cities have little access to mechanised cleaning; tier I cities like Delhi and Mumbai are counted as the most polluted cities in the world; logically, a number of things are to be done just to make the country and its cities functional.

The socio-economic situation opens a huge door for the business of cleaning that was so far limited to B2B.

Emerging Markets

Clean India Mission

As per the Press Information Bureau, 3.18 million toilets have been built between April 2014 and January 2015, which is 25.4% of the target for 2014-15. The government program aims to construct 120 million toilets in rural India by October 2019, at a projected cost of US$29 billion. Based on the marginal postulates of market equilibrium that an investment of $1 creates a $3 potential market, the US$29 billion investment will create a $87 billion market for cleaning products and services over a period of 2014- 2019. Of this, Swachh Bharat Mission envisages an investment of US$9.3 billion of which US$2.2 billion will be provided by the Central Government. The rest is expected to be raised by the states, urban local bodies, and from private players. While the World Bank is committed to provide $1.5 billion, the Global Sanitation Fund has amplified its support to the Swachh Bharat Mission and Namami Gange projects.

Clean Ganga

Like Clean India, Clean Ganga project has turned in to be a nationwide campaign that involves 118 ULBs across the five Ganga Basin States of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand. While the existing sewage treatment plants along the Ganga Basin have a capacity of only 1,027 million, the States generate 3,636 million litres of sewage per day that goes directly into the river. As far as the business potential and investments are concerned, “The Clean Ganga project will cost around $12 billion,” said Union Minister for Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Nitin Gadkari at Ganga Manthan, national dialogue. “The government may provide around 30% of this sum through viability-gap funding and the rest will come through a PPP model.”