Maithili Appalwar, IE 18
By: Tony Rehagen | Categories: Alumni Achievements
Maithili Appalwar says she feels like she was born to start a business. She grew up in what she calls a “startup family,” with parents who grew a packaging and plastics manufacturing company in Mumbai from a two-person mom-and-pop operation to a corporation that now employs 2,000. “After school when my parents were working, I’d go to their office and help them do tiny things,” says Appalwar. “I was not an actual help, but I always felt like part of a growing business. And that’s a feeling I’ve always wanted to have for myself.”
But while the entrepreneurial spirit came easy to Appalwar, the idea for how to apply it was a bit more elusive. In fact, it wasn’t until 2016, the summer before her third year at Georgia Tech, that inspiration struck. She was spending the break at home in India doing research for a second degree in psychology. She journeyed out into the impoverished rural parts of the country, where the suicide rate was particularly high. In trying to assess root causes of anxiety among these farmers, Appalwar realized that they had limited access to water. Irrigation systems were too expensive, as were tanks for storing extra water for when the rains didn’t come. Without water, the crops suffered, and so did the farmers, who had no money or food to provide for their families.
Talking with these farmers and recalling her classwork in industrial engineering, Appalwar helped them devise a solution. The farmers could use what little they had—land—and simply dig a large pit to collect rainwater. They could line and cover the artificial reservoir with a special polymer that would prevent percolation. “The idea was the farmers’,” says Appalwar, modestly. “They know what they need. They just needed someone to provide the bare minimum of what they need with creative design.”
Appalwar was only 19 years old. With two years of good grades at Tech behind her, she was on a path to a successful career with a cushy six-figure job in industrial engineering. But her trepidation in venturing out on her own was exceeded only by her fear of complacency. Besides, she had her family to back her up. Later in 2016, Appalwar started Avana, a firm under the umbrella of her parents’ Emmbi Industries. As CEO, she launched her water conservation solution under the name Jalasanchay. Avana now pulls in more than $10 million annually. But more importantly, the company has helped develop more than 8,000 ponds throughout India, helping save more than 322 billion liters of water, and watching farmers’ incomes go up by 98.7 percent. “A lot of billion-dollar companies pay little attention to the consumers,” says Appalwar. “We started a quality assurance team. I used to man the hotline myself. We’d get a lot of farmers calling to thank us. But the need is still massive.”
