Water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH) and waste management challenges faced by India are daunting and are causing tremendous damage to public health and environment. A multi-dimensional and multi-pronged approach of implementing innovations in technology, data, planning, monitoring and behavior change is the need of the hour. Also required is the coming together of multiple-stakeholders to collaborate and push the agenda.

Government of Telangana (GoT) has prioritized WASH and is deeply committed to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDG) targets well ahead of the globally agreed timelines. It is establishing a Wash Innovation Hub to support and promote start-ups and innovators in WASH. Administrative Staff College of India is knowledge partner to GoT in these efforts.

INK@WASH, the first offering from Telangana’s Wash Innovation Hub, is a unique platform for collaboration and partnerships between startups/innovators, mentors, academic institutions, non-profits, funders, and state/city governments. It provides an opportunity for promising innovators to pitch their innovation/idea, and funders and governments to assess suitability of the innovations and promote them for implementation at scale. The platform aims to achieve its objectives through learning events, pitch presentations, exhibitions, partnership meets, peer learning, and knowledge dissemination.

In a short span of time, INKWASH has emerged as a successful platform where a number of new ideas are exchanged, developed and promoted. Many State and City governments cities are benefiting from the from the collective knowledge of the innovators/startups being curated by ASCI. Some of the success stories are referenced below. In its second year, INKWASH summit focused on circular economy and innovations in plastic waste management. More than 20 promising innovations were selected from 180+ ideas using a robust process. Detailed documentation of these 20 innovations are compiled in the form of a book and disseminated widely. Further, 51 ideas with a potential to develop into innovative products and services are compiled into a catalog.

Inkwash has successfully conducted two seasons of INK@WASH Talks and helped many innovators/startups gain momentum and collaborate with cities, private enterprises, funders and mentors to bring wide scale improvement in WASH in India.