The story of the India Mark II hand pump

In 2001, I was in a relatively remote part of Mali, West Africa, at the edge of the Sahara, to design and build a school. Imagine my surprise when I saw a hand pump that looked exactly like the ones I had seen in India. I took a closer look and was astounded to see a fading ‘Made in India’ stencilled. Much later, I came to know that it was the “India Mark II”. What’s that, you ask? Let me tell you a story.

Saving lives

In the 1960s and 1970s, India faced severe droughts, and most existing pumps were imported models from the West designed for individual households. But here, they were used as community hand pumps, leading to frequent breakdowns. The Government of India, UNICEF, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) sought to address this challenge by developing a new pump — the ‘India Mark II’ — that was simple to manufacture, maintain, and operate at low cost. The design drew heavily from the innovative Sholapur hand pump. Developed by Oscar Carlsson, a Swedish engineer-inventor working for the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden and the Hindustani Covenant Church, it was designed for the bore wells drilled into the hard basalt of Maharashtra in the 1970s. The Sholapur Well Service was generous enough to share the design freely, and the institutional support and muscle of the organisations involved laid the foundation for the India Mark II, which offered superior mechanical efficiency and durability and drew water for community use from depths up to 50 metres. By the mid-1990s, it was the most widely used hand pump in the world, with around five million units installed around the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

How does it work? Simply put, the pump has a handle, water outlet, rod, piston, piston valve and a foot valve. It is installed on the top of a borewell. When the handle goes down, the piston moves up. This closes the piston valve and opens the foot valve to suck in water. As the handle moves up, the piston moves down, the foot valve closes, and the piston valve opens, squeezing water above the piston. When repeated continuously, it results in water coming out through the outlet.

Hand pumps on the Marina beach in Chennai India
| Photo Credit:
Jothi Ramalingam B.

India Mark II had its challenges, which led to the development of India Mark III, Afridev and other designs. But it was a foundational technology, symbolising the shift toward reliable, community-scale water supply solutions in developing regions. When Carlsson died in 2017, his friend Rupert Talbot paid tribute: “… countless rural communities still benefit from Oscar’s creative mind. … on behalf of them all … thank you, Oscar. Yours was a most useful and valuable life, well lived.”