Blue-Tech Frontier Roundtable: Desalination, Aquaculture and Coastal Resilience in the India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership

India and Israel share a strategic convergence. Both nations understand that water security, food systems resilience, and technology-led governance are competitive necessities rather than aspirational goals. India with the world's largest population, is a growing economy with expanding industrial corridors and a rapidly urbanising coastline, faces acute pressure on freshwater availability, agricultural productivity, and coastal livelihood security. Israel, having built the world's most advanced water management infrastructure under conditions of scarcity, offers a proven model of what institutional design, technology, and sustained investment can achieve. Israel is the global leader in water recycling, treating and reusing roughly 90% of its domestic wastewater. In January 2026, a high-level Indian delegation led by the Union Minister of Fisheries visited Eilat, where both sides signed a Joint Ministerial Declaration of Intent to strengthen cooperation in fisheries and aquaculture, recognising the sector's critical role in food security, livelihoods, and economic growth. This was formalised the following month at the February 2026 Modi-Netanyahu Jerusalem Summit, with a Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Fisheries and Aquaculture. The MoU paves the way for Indo-Israel Centres of Excellence for Fisheries and Aquaculture, high-end Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) collaboration, and a Joint Working Group to oversee implementation. Tamil Nadu sits at the centre of this opportunity. The state already hosts India's largest wastewater reuse facility at Koyambedu, a 45 MLD tertiary treatment plant built with Israeli technology, and is advancing a new 60 MLD seawater desalination plant in Tuticorin. The India-Israel Center of Water Technology at IIT Madras, alongside the International Centre for Clean Water (ICCW), provides the academic and innovation infrastructure to translate bilateral cooperation into deployable solutions. Tamil Nadu is the natural coastal state to pilot the institutional frameworks through which the Special Strategic Partnership's blue-tech commitments become operational programmes. The central question for this roundtable builds on the established evidence that Indo-Israel Blue-Tech cooperation delivers measurable outcomes. It focuses on how to accelerate, institutionalise, and strategically expand that cooperation across water infrastructure, smart urban systems, and blue food security, in ways that produce measurable gains in sustainable development and long-term competitiveness for both partners.