"A Company Worth Building": Nikhil Kamath Says It's Hiding In A Market India Never Built

India's next big infrastructure problem may not be land, power or capital. It may be water.

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath framed the problem bluntly: "Food, nuclear, pharma, data centres. India's four biggest growth bets are all water-intensive, being built in states that are already running out of it. The resource isn't priced. The metering is just starting.

Somewhere in that gap is a company worth building…”

What reads like a sharp investing insight is also a warning about the shape of India's growth. The same water tables that keep the country fed are now expected to support nuclear cooling, bulk-drug manufacturing and an AI-era data-centre boom, often in regions already under stress, Kamath said in series of posts. Groundwater-heavy food-bowl states such as Punjab and Haryana are extracting far more than they recharge, while energy, pharma and digital infrastructure are expanding across water-scarce belts including Rajasthan, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Behind Kamath's post is a simple, uncomfortable truth: India still does not really know what its water is worth. Much of the country's water is unpriced or heavily subsidised, with usage shaped by politics, power tariffs and leaky distribution systems rather than economic value. A market signal for conservation is hard to create when there is no reliable measure of how much is being pumped, treated, reused or wasted.

That is beginning to change. Government agencies are rolling out groundwater monitoring stations, live reservoir dashboards and water-body mapping to track the country's water lifeline more closely. At the same time, startups are installing meters inside factories, housing projects and campuses, building digital twins that track consumption down to the kilolitre. 

Together, these efforts are creating the first layer of a system India has long lacked: visibility.

Once water can be seen, the harder question is how to price it.

Unlike carbon, where a tonne is a tonne anywhere, water is hyperlocal. A litre saved in rain-fed Kerala is not the same as a litre saved in parched Rajasthan. Season, quality and scarcity all change its value. Any future water-credit system will need to reflect that reality by measuring the full supply-chain footprint, assigning location-specific values and allowing users to earn, trade or buy credits against clear limits.

Asia shows both the risk and the opportunity. The region has about 60% of the world's population but only around a quarter of its renewable freshwater, yet it has built few serious markets around water. Countries from China to Australia are experimenting with river-basin trading schemes and market-linked allocation models, while multilateral lenders are funding water-accounting frameworks in Indian states such as Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The first country to build a fair, politically viable pricing system could become the region's reference point for water valuation.

Other nations offer clues. Israel treats water as a strategic resource, charging close to full cost and recycling nearly all of what it uses. Singapore, with almost no natural freshwater, has built resilience through aggressive metering, reuse and desalination. Chile offers the cautionary tale: it pushed water privatisation so far in the 1980s that it later had to rewrite the rules amid concerns over hoarding, exploitative tariffs and the need to reassert water as a public good.

Food, nuclear, pharma, data centres.

India's four biggest growth bets are all water-intensive, being built in states that are already running out of it. The resource isn't priced. The metering is just starting.

Somewhere in that gap is a company worth building… pic.twitter.com/qGZ031Omy1

— Nikhil Kamath (@nikhilkamathcio) June 18, 2026

Grain, oil and carbon all evolved into large, tradeable markets. It is striking that the world's most consumed resource is still governed largely by ministries, subsidies and informal supply chains.

Kamath's provocation is that India's next great company may not sell a single drop of water. It may build the plumbing of a new system: the meters, exchanges, credit frameworks and financing rails that finally tell India, and perhaps all of Asia, what water is actually worth.