India is facing its worst water crisis ever, and some believe that by 2030 it will fail to meet half its water demand. As the climate heats up, it is likely that swathes of land will be submerged, water-related extremes will reshape industry and famine will revisit the country.
Watershed takes us through 4,000 years of history to track how India’s water has reached this critical point. With stories from across India it uncovers how India’s fate is gradually being sealed by the extremes of drought and floods.
Armed with this understanding, Mridula Ramesh lays out pragmatic, scalable solutions that can work for both India’s temperamental water and its democratic exigencies. She describes how determined water warriors from across India are showing the way forward and asserts that managing our water will usher in not just resilience but also the jobs India needs.
Sobering and persuasive, Watershed is a powerful call to action for every Indian to protect our shared future.
Mridula Ramesh
Mridula Ramesh is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed The Climate Solution and Watershed, and the founder of Sundaram Climate Institute, which focuses on waste and water solutions. She is an active cleantech angel investor with a portfolio of over twenty start-ups, and is frequently a speaker and jury member in national and international climate start-up forums and competitions. A graduate with distinction from Cornell University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Mridula worked at McKinsey in Silicon Valley and is the executive director of Sundaram Textiles – the company was amongst the first textile companies globally to win the coveted TPM Excellence Award. She is part of the board of trustees of World Wildlife Fund, India, and chairperson of the board of governors at National Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh. She lives and experiments in Madurai in a (nearly) net-zero-waste home with her husband and two children.