Who orders jars in Ahmedabad
Ahmedabad is Gujarat’s largest city, with about 63.6 lakh people in the urban agglomeration (Census 2011, an aggregator figure). It is a commercial and industrial city, and a jar supplier here can serve very different accounts on the same day.
- Residential societies and apartment blocks, especially in newer areas on the city’s edge such as Bopal. Several jars to one address, billed to a committee.
- Households. Smaller orders, often alternate days.
- Offices and commercial buildings. Daily jars with a fixed morning window.
- Shops, clinics and small eateries. Short steady orders.
- Factories and industrial units, if you serve them. Larger orders on working days, with gate procedures.
- Hostels and PGs, where one contact orders for many people.
Because tap water supply differs across the city, so does the reason for ordering a jar. In some places it is about habit or convenience. In others it is about the source. Ask each new customer why they order and note it. It tells you whether the account is stable.
Water supply, as reported
An older ICRIER and AMC presentation describes municipal supply as a Narmada canal with a 330 MLD gravity line to Kotarpur from 2007, plus Sabarmati-side French wells of about 170 MLD. These are older figures. A DeshGujarat report from 27 October 2025 says the Gujarat government approved an additional 1,000 MLD of Narmada water for Ahmedabad. An aggregator page reports municipal tap TDS of 120 to 300 mg/L, attributed to AMC data. We have not confirmed that figure from a primary source.
Groundwater is described differently. Aggregator-level sources report 400 to 1,200 ppm (unverified), and a 2005 study cited on the Bopal Wikipedia page put Bopal highest for conductivity, fluoride and chloride in that study. A 2005 study is old, and areas change.
Seasonal pressure points
We looked for sourced data on how summer, Uttarayan, Navratri or the wedding season affect jar demand in Ahmedabad and found none. So there is no reported calendar to give you. What you can do is read your own history.
- Compare delivered jars by month for the last twelve months.
- Compare extras on the day by month.
- Look at skipped stops around festival weeks, since customers who travel often skip.
If a pattern shows up, write it on a calendar with the next year’s dates, and plan jar stock and driver leave around it. The seasonal demand guide shows the method.
Planning routes
A city this large breaks into zones, and a driver who crosses zones loses time. Choose zones by where your customers actually are, not by administrative lines.
- Societies on the edge. If you serve Bopal and similar areas, group those societies on one route. A single large society can fill a large part of a driver’s day.
- Core and commercial areas. Dense stops with tight windows. Parking and building access are the real delay.
- Industrial customers. Fixed windows around shifts, and a person at the gate who knows the driver.
When a new society asks for service, look at where it sits relative to existing routes before you say yes. A single far-away society can cost more than it earns unless it takes a large number of jars. See running multiple delivery routes.
What to set up in an app
- Standing orders per society. Set the delivery days the society actually follows, and give each its own price. Per-customer pricing matters when rates differ by area. See standing orders and pricing per customer.
- Empties. Count them at every stop and compare delivered and returned numbers by society over a month. Societies tend to keep spare jars on several floors.
- Credit. Committees often pay monthly, sometimes after discussion. Record each payment on the day you get it, and use the dues report to catch slow accounts. The dues ageing guide explains the buckets.
Example (made-up round numbers, illustrative only). A society of 60 homes orders 15 jars a day at ₹40 each, which is ₹600 a day. If the nearest other stop is 6 km away, that one stop may need its own half-hour of driving. Looking at jars per hour for each cluster shows you whether to raise the price, set a minimum or add a fixed day.
How Pyaau helps
Pyaau builds each driver’s route every night from customers and standing orders. The driver swipes each stop delivered or skipped and sets jars and empties, with short and extra shown on the stop. The office sees a close-of-day summary with a bottle balance. The ledger shows each customer’s balance as Owes you or Credit, with invoices and payments in one list, and payments are applied to the oldest invoice first.
Payments are recorded in the app, and the app can run in Hindi. Coming next: WhatsApp billing and a web admin panel.