The Crisis That Crept Up on India

Across India, the signs of water scarcity no longer hide in remote villages. They show up in the country’s biggest cities, in stalled metro projects, in homes that wait for tankers at dawn, and in fields where farmers drill deeper each year only to find air pockets instead of aquifers.

India holds 18 percent of the world’s population but controls only 4 percent of its freshwater. The imbalance grows sharper as climate change pushes temperatures higher and increases rainfall volatility. According to national projections, India’s water demand may exceed available supply by 2030, creating a crisis that touches food, health, and industry.

Yet much of the stress remains invisible on paper. Districts marked “safe” often run out of groundwater. Wells marked “critical” sometimes still supply neighbours. Decisions about where to grow crops, build factories, or dig borewells rely on data that frequently lags behind reality.

India needs more water and more reliable ways to access it. But the most overlooked source hangs above everyone, every day.

The Sky as a Water Source

The atmosphere holds six times more water than all the world’s rivers. The vapour sits above cities and villages, waiting to condense. For decades, this idea stayed mostly in labs and research papers.

A young entrepreneur decided to make it practical.

How Akvo Entered the Story

Founded in 2017 by Navkaran Singh Bagga, Akvo Atmospheric Water Systems builds machines that make drinking water from humid air. What sounds like a futuristic idea has quietly become a working solution deployed in schools, offices, factories, and even disaster-hit regions.
The company, built with a team of 38 people, has stayed entirely bootstrapped. Akvo has taken no outside investment. The founder says this helped the company grow at its own pace and avoid trade-offs that often follow investor-driven scaling.

Since its first commercial installation in 2018, Akvo has placed more than 2,000 machines across 15 countries. These systems have produced over 100 million litres of clean drinking water without touching any natural source.

What the Machines Actually Do

Akvo’s Atmospheric Water Generators start with a simple idea. They draw humid air through a fan. The air passes through basic filters that strip dust and outdoor pollution. Then the machine chills the air inside a cooling chamber.
Condensation forms on cold surfaces, much like the droplets on a cold bottle in summer. These droplets gather in a stainless-steel tank.

The water then moves through sediment and carbon filters. A UV chamber neutralises bacteria and viruses. Minerals are added to balance taste and nutrition. The output is clean drinking water made without groundwater, pipelines, or plastic bottles.

Navkaran often says, they are not filtering existing water but creating it from a completely new source.

Built for Indian Humidity

India’s tropical and coastal cities — Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Goa — offer ideal humidity for AWGs. In these conditions, a single unit of electricity can produce up to four litres of water. Even in cities like Bengaluru, where humidity dips, the machines still yield two and a half litres per unit.

That efficiency matters when borewells fail and tankers crawl through narrow lanes. The machines work with regular power but also support solar panels and diesel generators. This flexibility allows them to operate in construction sites, hill towns, off-grid regions, and emergency zones.

Where Akvo Works — and What Changes on the Ground

Akvo’s footprint is scattered across some of the world’s most water-stressed geographies. As per the publicly available information, their technology is slowly threading its way into offices, apartment buildings, and industrial sites where the taps run dry far too often.

In Chennai — where summers are defined by queues at tankers and groundwater that recedes a little deeper each year — Akvo has deployed more than fifty machines. They sit quietly inside commercial blocks and residential towers, condensing moisture into a steady stream of drinking water. Similar units operate in Mumbai’s corporate corridors, where companies have turned to AWGs as a hedge against rising water costs and as a way to cut their dependence on plastic bottles.

Beyond India, Akvo’s machines occupy a place in the Gulf’s engineered landscapes, from the UAE to Saudi Arabia, where humidity hangs in the air even as freshwater remains scarce. The company also cites deployments in parts of South America, a region where increasingly erratic rainfall has pushed cities and communities to rethink water security.

What Akvo does not offer are elaborate case studies or place-specific stories. Instead, its public footprint reflects a quiet, incremental adoption — machines installed where the climate allows, and where people can no longer wait for the next tanker to arrive.

A Business Model Meant to Make Adoption Easier

Akvo sells its machines through two options. Some clients buy the systems outright. Others choose an OPEX model called BOOT — Build, Own, Operate, Transfer. Under BOOT, Akvo installs and runs the system at the client’s location with no upfront cost. The client pays for the water they use. This model benefits hotels, offices, and industrial facilities that need predictable costs and minimal maintenance. The goal is simple: remove friction that stops businesses from adopting sustainable water systems.

Can This Technology Scale?

Akvo is now in talks to expand across Africa and the Gulf, where water scarcity is rising and humidity is favourable. The company plans to upgrade its units to improve efficiency and bring down costs. Navkaran is cautious about claiming too much (about solving the global water crisis). “We areBut he argues that AWGs can sit alongside other systems — rainwater harvesting, desalination, groundwater recharge, and wastewater treatment. Together, these solutions create a diversified water ecosystem that relies less on a single source.

A Shift in How We Think About Water

Akvo’s rise points to a larger change. For years, India approached water mostly through infrastructure — build a dam, dig a canal, lay a pipeline, deepen a borewell. These systems work, but they face limits in a hotter, drier climate.

Akvo’s approach suggests something different. Water does not always need to be moved across states, pumped from deep aquifers, or bottled in plastic. Sometimes it can be created above the ground, close to the people who need it. The company is not promising miracles. Instead, it offers something more practical — control, predictability, and resilience. In a country where water crises now arrive without warning, that may be the beginning of a much-needed shift.