J.P. Subramonya Iyer, who invented the tap, was a grass-root innovator, start-up hero, global technology merchant. He served as an insurance officer in the erstwhile Travancore-Cochin state. Upon noticing the wastage of water from road-side water taps that were carelessly left open, he perceived the need to develop an automatically closing tap. With the help of a few friends who were engineers such as Sri Rajangam (who was the Deputy Chief Mechanical Engineer of South Indian Railway aka S.I.R.) and S.L.Narayanan, he developed such a tap.
