Summer blues

BENGALURU:  Summer is fast approaching and so are water woes. With irregular water supply timings, tankers are turning to be a saving grace.  To make it more accessible to people, city-based entrepreneur Shravanth Donthi has developed an app called Tankerwala, an aggregator of water tankers in various areas.  The idea was triggered from the issue that many people, including Donthi’s family, face when they request for a water tanker’s service. 

“Lack of water has been a major part of summers in Bengaluru and it’s quite hard to find tankers. The possibility of getting a tanker on time in quite low in the peak of summer. The reason for this is mostly segregated suppliers,” says Donthi, adding that the situation worsened during the lockdown.

Donthi, who had a baby last summer, encountered severe water shortage at his residence in Jayanagar. He had to ask his neighbours and others in his locality for contacts of tanker suppliers. Most times his calls went unanswered or in the rare event he got a response, the supply of water was very erratic. This led him to look for permanent solutions to improve the situation.

He developed Tankerwala, an app to improve predictability and make tankers more accessible to people across the city. Now, Tankerwala helps in aggregating water tankers in respective areas. “This is a hyper-local solution where you can connect with tankers in your locality. If a person in south Bengaluru books a tanker from Electronics City, the cost shoots up,” says Donthi, adding that currently they have around 1,300 tankers registered on the app.

The app is currently available on playstore and IoS, where people can download it, put in their location after which the options in the locality will show up. The app was started in January and Donthi says they have already broken even, having received 2,500 orders since its inception.