Science and Technology are making tremendous strides behind the scenes laying the foundation for a new kind of growth which will dominate the 21st Century and take mankind towards a more constructive future and a less polluting one. Science has always struggled with ways to end out better methods to create and provide food for the teeming human population which has seen a phenomenal growth in the last hundred years.
Today new technologies capable of making water and food out of thin air are making waves and for India they could prevent a looming crisis. The benefits of the Green Revolution and Operation Flood have more or less reached their peak in India as the country’s population has grown in leaps and bounds. Today more than one and half billion Indians live and work and prosper in the country, but feeding them and taking care of their water needs amounts to feeding the population of more than 20 to 30 nations.
On an average a nation has a population of 10 million to 30 million persons. In India the population of Uttar Pradesh alone is over 25 crores which means 250 million or a little less than what the population was when India attained independence in 1947.
All attempts to feed this population have targeted ground water and polluted and poisoned it to a large extent. While people drink water from the tap in western nations like Canada and USA as the water is safe to drink every middle-class Indian home has a water purifiers. Fertilizers and large scale use of lethal pesticides has created a temporary food revolution that feeds the Indian people and allows India to be a food exporting nation. However new technologies like the Israeli based Water generation can now extract water from air. Another start-up in Finland called Solar Food has begun to make microbe based protein powder by consuming greenhouse gases like Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere rather than depending on land based agriculture which produces greenhouse gases. For India the time has come to explore these new technologies to prevent the crisis that could come from climate change and loss of agriculture production due to water pollution and land degradation
