Mumbai, February 2020 – 2030 WRG Maharashtra State Coordinator Kavita Sachwani represented the 2030 WRG as a panelist at the Forbes India Sustainability Changemakers Summit championed by BNP Paribas for a discussion on actionable solutions to India’s water crisis. She spoke about the need for the recently introduced workstream on Alternative Financing for the Water Sector:

We really need to move from pricing water to valuing water. We have the Jal Jeevan Mission, Atal Bhujal Yojana, and the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana; we are also talking about raising tariffs and taxes, and we also have CSR funds. All these sources of finance together are also not enough to finance the gap. There is a gap of 2.5 Trillion USD in developing economies for meeting SDGs, and a significant portion of this is for water. We need to move beyond traditional models of financing and subsidy-driven models to newer and more innovative models of financing such as impact investing, alternative investment funds, blended finance, pension funds, and insurance companies.