Sword, Ploughshare And More

Israel can be the lab, and India the factory and the market. But Israelis want stricter patent laws and FTA

- Prasannan R

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s stupid novel of epic proportions, John Galt invents a motor that runs on air. Hot air! No physics.But an Israeli company, Water-Gen, has built a machine that produces water from air—cold air. And good physics. The machine sucks in air from around it, and cools it to produce water, just like cold wind blows on clouds and makes rain. It runs on little electricity, and is already installed in the Israeli embassy in Delhi. Maxim Pasik, WaterGen’s executive chairman, thinks it has huge potential in India. “We will soon install one on pilot basis at Delhi’s Connaught Place,” he said.

The machine comes in three sizes—a small one for homes, which can make 20 litres a day (30 in India, where the air is humid); another that makes 600 litres a day for schools; and a third that makes 5,000 litres a day for townships.

With no piping or pumping—and just connected to a simple power plug—the machine’s water will cost ₹1.6 per litre (at current rates). “The other beauty is that it doesn’t need maintenance—just change the filter once a year,” said Michael Rutman, a director of Water-Gen.

Israel has many such wizardries to offer India, which the more advanced western world does not have. The reason is simple. Western technologies are based on abundance of resources, whereas Israeli technologies presuppose scarcity of resources. The desert country gets hardly a week’s rain a year, and has only two small barrages and no dams, but it exports tomatoes and flowers to Europe and peppers to the rest of the world.

The trick is not just drip irrigation; the Israelis even have sensors that find out when a plant is thirsty and wet its bed—the plant bed. Half the water that Israelis drink and use in farms is desalinated sea water; 80 per cent of the water, including sewage, is recycled.