WaterHealth India, a leader in running decentralised water purification systems will cover the about 12 million population living in the limits of Brihat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, said WaterHealth International’s Chief Operating Officer Vikas Shah.

Currently, WaterHealth serves an estimated five million population across India, but were moving forward to achieving an audacious goal of serving 100 million consumers by the year 2020, he said, in reply to a question. He explained that similar agreements with large municipal bodies and other projects were in the pipeline and hence the confidence.

He was fielding a question at announcement of a strategic partnership with Vodafone India’s M-Pesa here on Thursday, according to which M-Pesa’s authorised agents would convert the hard currency collected by Business Associates at WaterHealth Centres everyday into digital money. This arrangement, Mr. Shah said would largely increase the operational efficiency of the company and drastically reduce the cost incurred, time and the effort now devoted for cash collection and transfers.

He said currently, the company operated 340 CHCs in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh together and would continue to use the M-Pesa service as it expanded in other parts of the country. “The broad arithmetic is each centre covers a population of 10,000,” he added.

From a modest beginning last year M-Pesa had grown to an estimated 90,000 M-Pesa outlets, pan-India, of which 63 per cent were in rural India, said Business Head, M-Pesa, Vodafone India, Suresh Sethi. This meant a significant contribution to the nation’s focus on financial inclusion in the current scenario there were only 1.09 lakh physical bank branches to serve the estimated 125 crore population of India.

Vodafone India’s Business Head for Telangana and AP, Rohit Tandon said that the Telangana and AP circles had 5,000 M-Pesa agents and one lakh customers using the service. M-Pesa here, he said was largely addressing the needs of about 50 per cent un-banked households.