E-Paper
Nobel breakthrough for India’s water stress
This article is authored by Vijay Kanuru, global entrepreneur in residence, Massachusetts Venture Development Center, Boston.
A gram of a remarkable material can have a surface area larger than several football fields. Within that invisible landscape of microscopic pores, molecules drifting in the air can be captured, stored, and released.
This is the promise of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), a class of ultra-porous materials pioneered by chemist Omar Yaghi. In recognition of this breakthrough, he was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
What began as an elegant exercise in molecular design may now offer something extraordinary: the ability to produce drinking water directly from the air.
A few months ago, in Hindustan Times, I wrote about how these advanced materials could help India confront its air pollution crisis in an article titled ‘A Nobel solution for India’s toxic skies.’ The same scientific revolution may now help address another looming challenge: Water scarcity.
Few scientific breakthroughs connect two of India’s greatest environmental anxieties so elegantly-polluted air in winter and water scarcity in summer.
To understand how this works, consider a familiar household device: A dehumidifier. It pulls moisture from the air by cooling it until water condenses. But such machines consume large amounts of electricity and struggle in dry climates.
MOFs work differently. Instead of cooling air, their internal architecture contains billions of tiny pores engineered to attract water molecules. Even when humidity is extremely low, the material can selectively trap water vapour from the air during cooler night hours. When sunlight warms the material during the day, the captured moisture is released and condensed into liquid water.
In essence, the system behaves like a solar-powered molecular dehumidifier-but far more efficient, capable of working even in desert air.
Solar-powered systems using these materials have already demonstrated the ability to generate hundreds to nearly a thousand litres of drinking water per day from dry air. In other words, the air around us-once considered empty-may soon become a new kind of reservoir.
For India, this is not merely an intriguing scientific experiment. A country facing declining groundwater, unpredictable monsoons, and rapidly growing cities will need entirely new ways to secure drinking water.
India today faces a twin environmental stress test. Air pollution in winter continues to erode public health, while summer brings water scarcity that threatens long-term sustainability across the country. This is no longer a problem limited to remote villages: even Bengaluru, Delhi, and Chennai face severe water shortages each year, with reservoirs dropping dangerously low and groundwater depleting rapidly. The climate crisis and rapid urbanisation intensify these pressures, making traditional water systems increasingly brittle.
For more than a century, modern water infrastructure has relied on transporting water across long distances-from rivers to reservoirs, and from reservoirs to cities. Atmospheric water harvesting suggests a different possibility: Instead of moving water to people, we may be able to produce it wherever people live.
Sometimes the most radical infrastructure is not a dam or a pipeline, but a material.
The implications for India are particularly striking. Large parts of the country--from the deserts of Rajasthan to the high-altitude landscapes of Ladakh, the salt flats of Kutch, and water-stressed urban areas-face chronic scarcity despite having air that still contains measurable moisture.
Technologies built on MOFs could potentially allow remote communities, disaster zones, urban apartments, or even military outposts to generate drinking water directly from the atmosphere. Just as rooftop solar panels allowed households to produce their own electricity, atmospheric water technologies could one day allow communities to produce their own drinking water.
At the heart of this breakthrough lies an elegant paradox of modern science: the solutions to some of humanity’s largest challenges may come from manipulating matter at the smallest scales. Scientists design pores a billionth of a metre wide. Yet those invisible architectures could reshape how cities drink, how deserts survive, and how nations secure their most essential resource.
India should not treat this breakthrough as merely an imported technology. It should view it as a strategic opportunity.
The country already possesses a strong ecosystem of chemists, materials scientists, and nanotechnology researchers across institutions such as the IITs, IISc, IISER and laboratories within the CSIR network. At the same time, India’s startup ecosystem is increasingly venturing into deep technologies, including climate innovation and advanced manufacturing.
What is missing is not capability but national focus. If India wants to shape the next generation of environmental technologies, advanced materials like MOFs must move from academic curiosity to strategic priority. A national research mission, pilot deployments in water-stressed regions, and support for deep-tech startups could accelerate this transition.
In a century where water scarcity may intersect with migration, conflict, and geopolitical tension, technologies that can generate water locally may become as strategically important as energy infrastructure.
For centuries, water has defined the geography of civilisation. Rivers created cities. Monsoons shaped agriculture. Reservoirs defined political power.
But what if water no longer needed a river, a dam, or even a cloud?
A quiet revolution in chemistry now suggests that the future of water may come from something far more invisible-the air around us.
The sky may become the world’s next reservoir.
This article is authored by Vijay Kanuru, global entrepreneur in residence, Massachusetts Venture Development Center, Boston.
