Governance in India is afflicted by a kind of retrograde amnesia. Every crisis revives the same lessons, and every calm period shelves intent and ideas. If Newton’s law has a political cousin, it is this: the urge for reform rises with the pressure of crisis, and once the crisis retreats, momentum evaporates.
Now that the Strait of Hormuz is open again, the heated calls for resilience, for transition to renewables and for conservation seem to have fallen silent. But water scarcity is a perennial, all-season urban reality. The systemic response is to treat the structural as cyclical— El Niño, bad monsoon or extreme events.
India is a nation of competing crises and conflicting compulsions. Politics and policy follow a familiar pattern: from hectic rhetoric to insolent drift, leaving the challenge of resilience and resolution for another day. There is no dearth of innovative climate solutions—from geothermal and ocean-wave energy to solar-powered desalination, from AI enabled precision farming to smart urbanisation—that can be adapted and adopted to deliver relief.
Europe is a red-hot zone this week as soaring temperatures notch new highs. To combat heat, cities are deploying district cooling systems. In Paris, water from the Seine is used in cooling networks for major institutions like the Louvre. Toronto’s Deep Lake Water Cooling system draws water from Lake Ontario to cool towers, hospitals and data centres. Stockholm’s district cooling system takes water from the Baltic Sea to onshore heat exchangers to provide ‘free cooling’ to the city grid.While it is tempting to imagine Sabarmati water being used to cool Ahmedabad, India faces far more fundamental problems. The monsoon has arrived, but it is expected to be the weakest in 11 years, with cumulative rainfall so far 42 percent below normal.
That deficit leaves cities with little option but to continue with water cuts. India receives over 1,800 mm of precipitation in a normal year, but most of it falls in just four months, while demand runs through all 12. The real constraint is an inadequate storage and distribution system.
That is why climate adaptation must be treated not as crisis management but as infrastructure policy. Morocco’s solar-powered desalination plants serve 17 million people in Casablanca and Rabat. Namibia’s plant delivers 20 million cubic metres of clean water, Jordan’s Aqaba-Amman project is designed to produce 300 cubic metres a year. Dubai is building the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant. St George in Utah, US is setting up a project to derive clean water from wastewater.
Spain is harnessing the power of waves deploying floating buoys, ocean thermal and floating solar pontoons to power desalination plants in Gaia and Canary islands. South Korea, France and Canada are tapping tidal power. In California, a new project dubbed ‘water farms’ is taking the filtration process below the surface, cutting energy costs. The value of the model is not just clean power, but cleaner and more resilient water production.
The lesson for India is that it is blessed with over 300 days of sunlight and a coastline of 11,098 km. The western seashores are blessed with a sunlight-rich seaboard, wind for turbines and ocean energy. India aspires to host a large number of data centres and AI infrastructure, which require millions of gallons of water and power. Think about it: desalination plants powered by renewables could serve cities, industry and even AI infrastructure. Wastewater recycling, district cooling and coastal energy systems can all be adapted to Indian conditions. India’s geography presents an opportunity to leverage emerging technologies to quench thirst and fuel its economy.
Central to the challenge of India being stranded in the low-middle income category is that nearly half its workforce is working on farms even as per-capita land holdings shrink and the spectre of climate stress intensifies on availability of water, soil conditions, output and incomes. Every forex or fiscal crisis hurts farmers as prices of fuel and inputs soar. Climate stress makes it worse. If India is to avoid the low-middle income trap, it must treat climate innovation not as a luxury but as a productivity strategy.
Renewable energy is a new crop in farms in the US, France, Italy and South Africa. Integrating solar power panels with grazing and crop fields enables multiple use of scarce resources and additional income for farmers, while protecting soil moisture and crops. Farmers in Canada and California have embraced precision farming. It brings together the potential of data, sensors, drones and AI. Smart irrigation cuts costs and water usage, CRISPR allows precise gene edits to protect plants, drone crop monitors nutrient sensors and AI-enabled harvesters deliver just-in-time value.
Innovations have spurred the rise of vertical farms in Singapore and the Netherlands. Dickson Despommier, the ‘father’ of vertical farming, claims the efficiency of each floor of a one-acre vertical farm could be equal to 10-20 soil-based acres depending upon the crop. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have heavily subsidised vertical farming as a food security strategy. Urban centres in Rotterdam house vertical farms using hydroponics and aeroponics. Singapore is growing food in car parks and retrofitted buildings. Can the ugly spaces in India under metro tracks and flyovers be repurposed on lease for vertical farming? The future of farming cannot be one solution, but a basket of innovations.
The politics of adaptation in India must move beyond doom framing to deliverable solutions. Theory states that voters care about water, electricity and jobs. Politicians and the babudom respond to incentives. The choice before India is not whether it can afford to adapt—it is between adaptation and abdication.
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
Shankkar Aiyar
Shankkar Aiyar, political economy analyst, is author of ‘Accidental India’, ‘Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12-Digit Revolution’ and ‘The Gated Republic –India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions
