ISUW 2022 Speaker

Venkatesh has over 34 years of experience in Government, Consulting and EPC sectors in water projects. He is adept in planning, design and construction of large water supply & distribution and wastewater projects for Municipal Utilities. In his earlier assignment, he was heading the ‘Water Management Business Segment’ at Larsen & Toubro Ltd. and responsible for delivering performance-based water management contracts across India. He has worked extensively on smart water projects specific to equitable pressure management, asset mapping on GIS, hydraulic modelling, NRW reduction, billing and meter data management at L&T. He started his career at Tamilnadu Water Supply & Drainage Board, a state-owned utility, and was actively involved in several water supply projects for the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in the state of Tamilnadu. Later, he moved to engineering consulting and spearheaded ‘Water & Infrastructure’ business at Fichtner Consulting Engineers Pvt Ltd. He was instrumental in developing Feasibility studies, Detailed Project Reports, EIA & EMP framework for municipal projects under JNNURM, ADB and KfW funding. He played an active role as the ‘Technical Auditor’ for the 24x7 water distribution project implementation in three demo zones of Hubli-Dharwad, Belgaum and Gulbarga cities under World Bank funded KUWASIP. During 2007-08, he worked as an external consultant for Asian Development Bank and was responsible for enabling MIS framework for infrastructure PPP projects in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. He also has onsite project experience in Land development & Industrial parks in USA & Vietnam. He was the Project Lead for planning & design of two integrated land development projects of 400 acres and 230 acres at Pinal and Maricoppa counties in Phoenix, Arizona USA. Venkatesh is a Civil Engineering graduate from REC (NIT) Trichy and holds a Masters’ degree in Environmental Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai. He is a certified ‘Master Modeller’ by Haestad Methods Inc. (presently Bentley Systems) in hydraulic modelling of water networks and an ESRI certified GIS professional on ArcGIS applications.