Pakistan water woes offer a test for startup Paani+

Pakistan’s water challenges present a paradox: water shortages affect households and farmers, while heavy rainfall can overwhelm urban drainage systems and flood homes and businesses. For startups developing products to manage water, the challenge is not only addressing these problems but also persuading customers to pay for solutions before a crisis occurs.

Karachi-based startup Paani+, founded by Haseeb Ansari, is seeking to build a business around this gap. Its product range includes absorbent barriers intended to limit floodwater intrusion, soil treatments designed to retain moisture and materials developed to solidify liquid spills in healthcare settings.

In Karachi and other cities across Pakistan, water has a peculiar way of being both absent and impossible to escape.

For much of the year, households pay for tankers, gardeners worry about keeping plants alive and farmers try to stretch limited supplies across crops. Then the monsoon arrives, sometimes turning the same water from a scarce commodity into an intruder — entering streets, shops and homes faster than drains can carry it away.

It is a contradiction that increasingly defines Pakistan’s relationship with water: too little where it is needed, too much where it is not.

The numbers behind that contradiction are formidable. Agriculture accounted for 94% of Pakistan’s freshwater withdrawals in 2022, according to World Bank data. The 2022 floods affected 33 million people, caused more than $30 billion in damages and economic losses. In August 2025, Karachi was hit particularly hard, with over 135mm of rainfall overwhelming the city’s drainage system.

Ansari thinks there may be a better and smarter way to control water and make it manageable.

“There are two different extremes,” he said in an interview to Business Recorder. “There is a lot of water in one place. And there is no water in the other place.”

That observation became the organising principle behind the company producing absorbent-material products for applications ranging from flood protection and agriculture to healthcare, he added.

From a flooded home to a product

Ansari says the idea for Paani+ emerged after his home in Karachi was flooded.

“That was something that I couldn’t do anything about. And I had to just see my furniture getting floated away. When water comes in, the last thing you want to do is shove sand in the sandbag,” he said.

That frustration eventually became FloodGuard; a lightweight sack containing absorbent material that activates on contact with fresh water, he added.

According to Ansari, a roughly 300-gram bag can swell to around 15 to 20 kilograms once activated within three to five minutes, creating a temporary barrier that can be positioned around entrances to slow or divert incoming water.

Paani+ currently markets the product as an alternative to traditional sandbags. It comes with a water-diversion sheet intended to reduce seepage beneath or between barriers.

The company also claims its absorbency has been tested by the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, PCSIR.

Ansari clarified that the product was not intended to replace large-scale drainage systems or engineered flood-control infrastructure. The company’s own published guidance describes it as temporary protection rather than a replacement for permanent flood defences.

Selling preparedness before disaster strikes

As per Ansari, demand for FloodGuard comes from multiple Pakistani cities, including Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Murree. He mentioned receiving an order for 200 bags from Park View City in Lahore following previous flooding and said some customers placed urgent orders during flood events.

He pointed to the response following the Gul Plaza fire in Karachi as an example of how quickly attitudes towards prevention can change after people see the consequences of being unprepared.

“After the Gul Plaza fire incident, people actually started buying fire extinguishers. But before that, they were not really looking forward to investing any money on that.”

Ansari believes changing that behaviour will require convincing people that flood protection should sit in a home much like a fire extinguisher does: unused most of the time and valuable because it is there when needed.

Smarter irrigation

Paani+’s agricultural answer is GrowMate+, a moisture-retaining material mixed into the soil around the root zone. It absorbs water during irrigation and is designed to release it gradually as the surrounding soil dries.

In Sindh, irrigated agriculture is central to the rural economy, but water losses remain substantial. The World Bank estimates that 60% to 75% of water withdrawn in the province can be lost through surface evaporation or seepage into saline groundwater.

“This was one extreme that we were getting a lot of water,” Ansari said. “The other extreme is that we don’t have water.”

He said the product was developed around the problem of crops and plants receiving water intermittently rather than consistently.

“It holds water. It has natural pest repellent. It boosts the root and the overall growth, which results in better yield and better size of the flower or fruit.”

The company’s current catalogue describes GrowMate+ as a soil moisture and nutrient retainer and HydroSoil as a long-lasting plant hydration pack.

For Ansari, the commercial proposition is not merely that the material can absorb water. Absorption itself is hardly new. The value, he argued, lies in designing its formulation and packaging around a particular problem.

Managing medical waste

Inside hospitals, water is not the problem. Liquid is.
Blood, urine and other infectious fluids can create a very different form of risk, requiring staff to contain, disinfect and dispose of spills without unnecessarily spreading contamination.

Paani+ says it developed MediSorb around that problem.

“Our hospitals deal with infectious waste every day and they use decades-old methods to tackle those situations,” Ansari said. “MediSorb is engineered to contain medium to large spills if there’s any blood, urine, or any kind of infectious waste, liquid, which is on the floor.”

Ansari explained that the powder is sprinkled directly over a spill, solidifying it into a material that can then be scooped up for disposal.

“Infection-control personnel pointed out that solidifying a spill did not eliminate the separate disinfection step; they still have to use bleach or any other thing. So we developed MediSorb Plus for them, in which there is chlorine integrated and you don’t have to use another step,” he added.

Ansari said the product had been evaluated with private hospitals and that the company was moving through procurement processes.

The problem with creating a category

Ansari said many of their applications remained unfamiliar to Pakistani buyers.

“The feedback that I get is like, that’s fine. But I don’t think this would be feasible in our environment. And people would not accept it,” he feared.

“But I think it’s just part and parcel of the business of a new thing, because we are creating a category. We are not introducing a different product. It’s a whole new category, whether it is in agriculture or flood resilience or healthcare.”

Haseeb mentioned that the company initially used conventional advertising but found organic videos and demonstrations more effective. He estimated that about 90% of orders were coming organically rather than through paid advertising.

He said government institutions including disaster-management and local-government bodies responded positively to demonstrations, but positive feedback did not automatically become procurement.

“The feedback was really positive. But I think that was the only thing that they gave.”

For Paani+, the focus is simply on making water easier to manage, whether that means keeping it out, holding it where it is needed, or controlling it when it becomes difficult to handle.

“People shouldn’t have to fight water every day,” Ansari concluded.