Israeli Firm Provides Drinking Water For India And Vietnam — From Air

By Andrew Tobin April 4, 2017

TEL AVIV (JTA) — An Israeli company has signed deals to produce drinking water — by extracting it from the air — in India and Vietnam, two countries that have long faced shortages.

Water Gen inked an agreement last week with India’s second largest solar company to produce purified water for remote villages in the country. Earlier, the company arranged with the Hanoi government to set up water generators in the Vietnamese capital.

“The government of Vietnam greatly esteems the technological developments in Israel, and I hope that the Israeli technology that we supply to Vietnam will significantly help to improve water conditions in the country,” Water Gen President Mikhael Mirilashvili said after the signing in Hanoi, according to a statement.

The memoranda of understanding are worth $150 million in total, according to Water Gen, which was founded in 2009 and creates technology that extracts water from the air for use by civilians and soldiers who do not have access to clean sources.

About 1.2 billion people, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population, live in areas of water scarcity, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. More than 75 million of India’s 1.25 billion people lack access to clean water, according to a report last year by Water Aid, a water and sanitation nonprofit. And Vietnam has struggled to provide its 95 million people with water because of contamination, poor infrastructure and heavy agricultural demand.

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