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Comment by daedrdev | Hacker News Reader

This is not the first project like this Egypt has tried. All have failed

To be fair, Egypt and Mexico made major reforms to their water usage in the past and succeeded. Compared to India, which failed abjectly.

How did India's water usage reforms fail?

I've been in Egypt and India - they aren't that different, and it's Indian companies that are working on and helping financing these megaprojects in Egypt via the credit line established after the pandemic [0] and it's Indian companies like Wabag that are implementing water treatment projects in Egypt [1].

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/egypt-say...

[1] - https://www.arabnews.com/node/2130826/middle-east

India uses something like a quarter of the world's groundwater. 20 years ago, it was all open channels, which lose 40-80% of water due to evaporation and seepage. Mexico and Egypt fixed this decades ago.

Nowadays, farmers have shifted to directly using groundwater, and just pump as much water as possible from wells (thus depleting them). This is exacerbated by: 1) Relying on flood irrigation (ie just let water flow across the field and evaporate, vs drip) 2) As temperatures rise, using even more water

The situation was already pretty dire, and despite various efforts, it's getting much worse.

https://fse.fsi.stanford.edu/news/indian-groundwater-depleti...

Do these Indian companies implement things in India?

Yes, you may have to update your knowledge on the insane infrastructure boom going on in India right now.

And, they aren't doing in sustainable way, worst than China.

Yes, but they are building up a bunch of companies that can do complex infrastructure work from soup to nuts. One step at a time.

Yes. And they're the same companies that were contracted and subcontracted infrastructure across the Khaleej and ASEAN.

Larsen & Toubro, Wabag, SP Group, EIL, Afcons, and others tend to have a chokehold on implementing and executing these kinds of projects in MENA because they co-finance projects with Gulf capital players who tend to have capital stakes in these Indian players as well.

India relies on groundwater and its strategy has been to use the monsoons to replenish the groundwater under the Jal Shakti Abhyan. The monsoons come like clockwork so it’s a solid strategy.

No, it is deeply stupid strategy, because groundwater is being depleted much faster than it can be replenished:

"We reviewed 160 journal articles, along with supplementary data and reports from GW, agriculture, and meteorological authorities. Our focus was on GW depletion in India, with particular emphasis on GRACE satellite data, in situ observations, and the influence of hydrogeological conditions, anthropogenic activities, and climatic disturbances. GRACE observations reveal significant depletion, particularly in Eastern Uttar Pradesh at 7 cm/yr rate from 2002 to 2022, while localized in situ data highlight Punjab as the most rapidly depleting area, with a rate of 46 cm/yr (2003–2012)."*

*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23528...

It is clearly not working. Groundwater in India is being drained faster than it is being replenished. Wells have gone so deep that people are now worried about heavy metals like arsenic.

State and financial capacity is much stronger in Egypt today versus previous attempts.

Egypt's developmental indicators have finally caught up to where the CEE was 5-10 years ago but with a better demographic profile, and Gulf and Asian capital and technology partners are much more hands-on.

If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.

[1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...

And there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026.

A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria.

The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects.

> better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990

Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.

Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)

Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.

Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.

And if you remember 2010-13 Egypt was also on the verge of collapsing into a civil war like Syria and Yemen yet didn't. That took a Herculean amount of effort.

Yeah, Ottoman rule sucked.

Yugo wasn't doing so bad in 1990 before it imploded for other reasons (read: was "suicided")

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