 There's a lot of water issues around the world. We definitely feel it here in California and just imagine it 10, 20, 50 times worse in other places. I have a passion to see people having water. My name is Chris Hyun. I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the Energy Resources Group. One of Bangalore's biggest problems is intermittent water supply, meaning they don't get water all the time. There's not 24-7 water. This is the problem that affects 400 million people in the developing world, 250 million of those living in India. The average household in Bangalore gets about 4.5 hours of water every other day. It tends to be off schedule. Sometimes I have to wait many hours all day for water that may or may not come. If you have enough money, you would store water when the water comes. They'll build in rooftop tanks. If you can't afford that, you just have to fill every bucket and pot and pan you have in the house whenever the water comes. The way the water utility gets their water through pipes to the people is through these people called valve men. And the valve men, they basically go to different neighborhoods and turn the water on and off according to a schedule. And it should work except there are a lot of different roadblocks along the way. There can be technical problems such as pumps being broken and just there's just no water. Or there could be different social problems like maybe the valve men is sick, or maybe their child is sick. Maybe they're on a lunch break and they just can't get to the valve on time. And so there's a company called Nextdrop, which was started by UC Berkeley students. And they tell people when the water will turn on and off because people don't really know when they're gonna get water. Our research project was about looking at Nextdrop and seeing how its services could impact a large city like Bangalore. Valve men all have cell phones and they contact Nextdrop every time they open a valve or close a valve. And every time there's a delay in service. And then Nextdrop takes that information and sends that to the customers telling them okay your water will be turned on in about an hour and a half or your water is going to be delayed or there's going to be no water today. It's going to take decades to actually pull together financing to actually rebuild these systems. But what they've developed is an intermediate solution that makes it much easier for households to cope with what is admittedly a more deficient service. What we found were the different inefficiencies in the water utility and the various roadblocks for valve men to give that accurate information to Nextdrop. In the developed world we're used to just turning on the water and it's turning on and we don't know how it got there. And to follow around the valve men and to see what they go through on a day-to-day basis, to see pipes broken, to see them not able to do their jobs many times. You can see the process that it takes to get that water into your tap. Even valve men can be quite crucial to the whole thing to making water systems work.