WORK WILL BE FLOWING
Ganges cleanup a huge job
On the 12th storey of the stylish Naman Midtown skyscraper, a stone’s throw from the Canadian Embassy and just up the road from the Trump Tower Mumbai, Joel Fernandes’ wellappointed office is furnished with touches from far away: doors made of Douglas fir, hemlock cabinets, a pagoda made of western red cedar, a Haida blanket.
Now Fernandes wants to see more of B.C., and Canada, in India.
In August, Fernandes took over as director of the B.C. government’s International Trade and Investment Office, India, helping B.C. companies to do business in India and Indian companies to invest in B.C. The following month, he was in downtown Vancouver for the B.C.India Partnership Summit, appearing on a panel to discuss clean-tech opportunities and encouraging Canadian businesspeople to dive in and do business in India.
Fernandes has a particular interest in getting Canadian firms involved in India’s massive effort to clean the Ganges River, which is at once sacred, vital for the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people, and heavily polluted by industry.
But, he said, Canadian businesspeople often hesitate to get involved in such a large project on the far side of the planet.
“What I said was: ‘Forget about size. We are not living in the size world anymore, it’s how fast you can get to it. They say it’s not the big fish eating the small fish anymore, it’s the fast fish eating the slow fish,” he said. “You’ve got to move on from that thinking.
“Because there is an opportunity — the river is not going to be cleaned right from A to Z, you’re going to clean it in parts. And you might get one piece of that pie, and that could be a couple of million dollars for that small company. It’s a big pie.”
The Indian government approved a budget of 200 billion rupees, or almost $4 billion, for the Ganga Rejuvenation project. The World Bank has pledged US$1 billion in support of the effort.
The project holds special importance for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, who has said: “It’s my destiny to serve Maa Ganga (Mother Ganges),” and “Mother Ganges has called me.”
Modi has also said that in addition to the river’s huge cultural and spiritual significance, “cleaning the Ganges is also an economic agenda.”
Purifying the holy, but filthy, waterway would be no small feat: The World Bank reports the 50 major Indian cities along the Ganges produce around three billion litres of sewage every day, only a fraction of which is treated before being dumped in the river.
Fernandes, over Indian craft beers in an artsy Mumbai bar in a converted former textile mill, said: “I am an Indian, I want the Ganga to be cleaned. And I want B.C. companies and Canadian companies to be involved in the work.”
One Canadian looking at the opportunities presented in the Ganges is Jerry Hanna, whose company Clearflow Group Inc. has grown from an experiment with fish tanks in his basement to a global operation.
Following a successful pilot project over the last two years in Punjab in northern India, Hanna said, Clearflow has this year received a new round of approvals from the Indian government and is now “looking to expand those results in India.”
Back in Canada, Clearflow’s business over the past decade has focused on selling water treatment products and technologies to major Canadian resource companies such as Teck and Enbridge. And now as Clearflow looks to expand internationally, Hanna said, the company is in talks with governments, industry and regulatory agencies about improving waste water treatment and recycling for both industrial and municipal use.
In January, Hanna travelled through three Indian states with a program called Water Innovation Lab, part of a delegation of about 55 people, most of whom are based in India or Canada. While there, Hanna met with Indian government officials, research institutions, business associates and community groups, discussing his company’s technology.
The innovation lab was co-hosted by IC-IMPACTS, an Indian-Canadian venture involving government, business and scientists in both countries, and Waterlution, an Ontario-based non-profit that organizes international waterthemed events. Such programs aim to “develop the next generation of water leaders,” said Waterlution executive director Karen Kun.
These events, like January’s 12-day innovation lab program in India, draw a broad crosssection of participants, including many in their 20s and 30s, working in various water-related fields: chemistry PhD students, professional engineers working for major municipalities, founders of tech startups. Hanna was impressed, he said, to meet young Indian entrepreneurs like Happy Patel, a 23-year-old grad student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. who has launched 13 startup companies (“Eight failed,” Patel said, “two I sold out, and three are ongoing”) and Swapnil Shrivastav, also 23, whose own Bangalore-based startup has developed a technology for converting air into potable water.
Hanna says aligning his company with Waterlution and ICIMPACTS represents “a very big opportunity to take our technology to the next level ... because they’re already global.”
Reached at home in Sherwood Park, Alta. recently, weeks after returning from Delhi and days before departing for Shanghai, Hanna said his travel itinerary over the coming months includes several more trips to Asia and Europe, at the invitation of governments wanting to learn more about Clearflow’s technology.
“I will probably only be home for about four months this year,” he said.
The “next stage of the project” involves introducing bringing it back to Canada, Hanna said, starting with indigenous communities in Northern Alberta.
“The water issue in Canada for indigenous peoples is huge. They’re carrying heavy metals, arsenic, E. coli, all these different things that are going into the water. And we know we can take these out,” said Hanna, who grew up on Vancouver Island and comes from a Métis background. “Our goal is to develop the best water-treatment system through this collective collaboration for not only India, but also for our Canadian indigenous peoples.”
Water security challenges also have a “direct effect” on India’s ofttouted GDP growth rate, said Sanjay Deshpande, head of operations for the Indian division of Clearford Water Systems, a publicly listed Canadian sewage treatment and recycling company.
“If you are a poor farmer in a rural village and you drink sewage- contaminated water and fall sick, you often have to be transported to a hospital far away in a larger town. While being treated, instead of working and earning money you are gradually going into a debt spiral caused by having to pay for daily living expenses and medical treatment, said Deshpande, who is based in Pune, a two-hour drive east of Mumbai. “As approximately 65 per cent of India’s population lives in rural India, you get an idea of the scale of the problem.”
Clearford is “very interested” in the opportunity to get involved in the Ganges rejuvenation effort, Deshpande said, adding the company “has had many discussions with the government of India in this regard” and anticipates getting involved in future phases of the project.
Officials from IC-IMPACTS, including CEO Nemy Banthia and UBC’s former president Arvind Gupta, met last month in Delhi with representatives from the National Mission for Clean Ganga to discuss opportunities for Canadian scientists and companies to get involved with the project. Banthia said the water sector in India presents an “absolutely huge, mindboggling” business opportunity for Canadian firms.
The day after Banthia returned to Vancouver, he said he views ICIMPACTS’s role as a trade catalyst as its “primary objective.”
Canadian-Indian bilateral trade grew more than 40 per cent in the last five years. But, Banthia said, there remains huge room for growth. Canada’s two-way total trade with India for 2016 was just over $7 billion — just over a tenth of Canada’s $59.9-billion two-way trade with China.
About 70 per cent of Canada’s total international trade is done with a single partner: the United States. So it’s vital now, Banthia said, for Canadian businesses and governments to look at Asia and the rest of the world for business opportunities if the U.S. enters an era of trade isolationism under President Donald Trump.
“We’ll be thankful to Trump in 40 years’ time,” Banthia said, “for making us stand on our own feet, and not putting all our eggs in one basket, which is what we have been doing. We need to really move ahead and start growing trade elsewhere.” dfumano@postmedia.com twitter.com/fumano Dan Fumano’s trip to India was supported by an Asia Pacific Foundation media fellowship, which is sponsored by Cathay Pacific.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Raju does not own a photo of his daughter Sohani. She died from a water-borne illness in September, nine days before her eighth birthday.
The only mementoes he has are her birth certificate and a death certificate. To a poor farmer like Raju, the forms represent the extent of the Indian state’s involvement in his remote tribal community, one of many where dirty water kills people every rainy season. The water crisis in Raju’s community is something leading minds in India and Canada are racing to address, as they collaborate to tackle both countries’ water challenges. They have more in common, these experts say, than many realize.
This series takes us from Sohani’s rural village to the teeming metropolis of Mumbai, to Canadian university laboratories and to the Lytton First Nation in B.C., the stories all tied together by the same thing that killed Sohani and keeps all of us alive: water.