UTIF, Villgro launch 18-month programme to scale circular urban solutions across Tamil Nadu

Chennai: The University of Toronto India Foundation (UTIF) and Villgro Innovations Foundation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to launch TN-CIRCLE (Tamil Nadu – Circular Innovation, Resource & Climate Leadership Ecosystem), an 18-month programme aimed at helping waste and used-water innovations move beyond pilots and into municipal systems across Tamil Nadu.

The programme will work with six waste and used-water ventures, with an objective of helping cities reduce or reuse around 1,000 metric tonnes of waste, save or reuse nearly 15 million litres of water, and benefit more than one lakh people.

TN-CIRCLE was unveiled at the Urban Solutions Lab held at IIT Madras Research Park in Chennai, bringing together stakeholders from Tamil Nadu’s urban innovation ecosystem.

The initiative will establish a Collaborative Cluster for Urban Climate Solutions, bringing together urban local bodies, technology ventures, researchers, industry and civil-society organisations to identify municipal challenges, test solutions and develop approaches that can be integrated into city systems.

The programme will initially focus on Chennai and Tiruchirappalli (Trichy), with the possibility of expanding to other urban centres in Tamil Nadu.

Its areas of intervention will include wastewater treatment and reuse, municipal solid-waste recovery, technology-enabled waste planning and collection, reduction of water losses, and restoration of urban waterbodies and stormwater systems.

The initiative comes amid growing pressure on urban water and waste-management systems. The need to strengthen wastewater treatment, reuse and resource recovery has also been highlighted in NITI Aayog’s 2026 report, Scenarios Towards Viksit Bharat and Net Zero – Sectoral Insights: Waste.

The report points to treated wastewater reuse in sectors such as agriculture, construction and horticulture as an avenue for reducing freshwater demand and improving resource efficiency.

Under TN-CIRCLE, programme partners will first work with Urban Local Bodies to identify specific operational challenges and requirements. Ventures will then be assessed against these needs, followed by technical assessment, due diligence, matching with municipal hosts and on-ground deployment.

The programme will subsequently monitor the deployments and document lessons from implementation, with the aim of identifying the conditions that enable successful adoption and replication.

Gauravi Lobo, Director, University of Toronto India Foundation, said the key challenge for urban innovations was not merely developing companies or technologies, but ensuring that cities had the institutional and financial mechanisms to adopt them.

“Building companies is the easier half of this problem. The harder half is making sure there is a buyer with a budget line at the end of the pilot,” Lobo said, adding that the programme would make a sustained commitment to Chennai and Trichy rather than treating them as short-term pilot locations”

Under the partnership, UTIF will contribute to programme design, research, technical expertise, selection inputs, institutional relationships and knowledge exchange. Villgro will lead programme management and on-ground coordination, drawing on its experience of working with enterprises and Urban Local Bodies.

Rini Dutta, Chief Growth Officer, Villgro Innovations Foundation, said the major challenge for urban innovations was often moving from a successful pilot to sustained adoption within municipal systems.

“The hardest journey for an innovation is often not from idea to product, but from a successful pilot to sustained adoption within municipal systems,” Dutta said.
She added that the programme would work with Urban Local Bodies to help promising solutions become technically validated, operationally ready and aligned with actual city requirements.

Through TN-CIRCLE, the two organisations aim to demonstrate how validated waste and used-water solutions can move from isolated pilots into everyday urban operations.

The partners also plan to document implementation experience to generate practical lessons for cities, innovators and ecosystem organisations seeking to replicate such solutions across Tamil Nadu and potentially in other urban municipal systems.