Fixing the Water Mess in India

We have a three-part strategy to revolutionize the water story in India.  The first part is to come up with ways that are politically feasible to start pricing water and electricity.  This is done through field experiments with farmers to figure out how they can participate in this.  The second is you have to save water for this strategy to work or to put it another way, to increase the productivity associated with the same amount of water.  So we are taking technology and coming up with strategies by which that technology can be used by say a million farmers added per year into this particularly strategy.  The third part of the strategy is to deliver the farmer higher income and shift the crops to ones that are less water consuming at the same time and that involves bringing in corporations that are sufficiently enlightened to see that developing the agricultural marketplace in India is to their advantage and helping farmers at the same time is beneficial.  

If you put it together, price, technology and procurement, those three things get you out of the mess that India is in today and it’s all on demand management and not on building new infrastructure at the moment.  

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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