India's $80 billion coal-power boom is running short of water

Krishna N. Das and Sarita Chaganti Singh

Sun, Jun 8, 2025, 11:42 PM 8 min read

By Krishna N. Das and Sarita Chaganti Singh

CHANDRAPUR/SOLAPUR, India (Reuters) -April marks the start of the cruelest months for residents of Solapur, a hot and dry district in western India. As temperatures soar, water availability dwindles. In peak summer, the wait for taps to flow can stretch to a week or more.

Just a decade ago, water flowed every other day, according to the local government and residents of Solapur, some 400 km inland from Mumbai.

Then in 2017, a 1,320-megawatt coal-fired power plant run by state-controlled NTPC began operations. It provided the district with energy - and competed with residents and businesses for water from a reservoir that serves the area.

Solapur illustrates the Catch-22 facing India, which has 17% of the planet’s population but access to only 4% of its water resources. The world's most populous country plans to spend nearly $80 billion on water-hungry coal plants by 2031 to power growing industries like data center operations.

The vast majority of these new projects are planned for India's driest areas, according to a power ministry document reviewed by Reuters, which is not public and was created for officials to track progress.

Many of the 20 people interviewed by Reuters for this story, which included power company executives, energy officials and industry analysts, said the thermal expansion likely portended future conflict between industry and residents over limited water resources.

Thirty-seven of the 44 new projects named in the undated power ministry shortlist of future operations are located in areas that the government classifies as either suffering from water scarcity or stress. NTPC, which says it draws 98.5% of its water from water-stressed areas, is involved in nine of them.

NTPC said in response to Reuters' questions that it is "continuously striving towards conservation of water with best of our efforts in Solapur," including using methods like treating and reusing water. It did not answer queries about potential expansion plans.

India's power ministry has told lawmakers in parliament, most recently in 2017, that the locations of coal-fired power plants are determined by factors including access to land and water and that state governments are responsible for allocating water to them.

Access to land is the dominant consideration, two federal groundwater board officials and two water researchers told Reuters.

India's complex and arcane land laws have delayed many commercial and infrastructure projects for years, so power operators under pressure to meet burgeoning demand pick areas where they are likely to face little resistance, said Rudrodip Majumdar, an energy and environment professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru.