Rahul Gandhi taunts PM Modi; ministers, scientists come to the rescue

Rahul Gandhi on Friday taunted Prime Minister Narendra Modi over remarks on using wind turbines to extract water from air moisture to solve drinking water problems in coastal areas, prompting his ministerial colleagues to school the Congress leader on Danish technologies.

“The real danger to India isn't that our PM doesn't understand. It's the fact that nobody around him has the guts to tell him,” the former Congress president said sharing a video of Modi’s interaction with the top executive of a turbine maker.

In the video, the Prime Minister is heard saying that if wind turbines could collect moisture from the air, besides producing power, it could help address the problem of shortage of drinking water.

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal took to schooling the Congress leader on emerging technologies and hit back at him for mocking the Prime Minister.

“Nobody around Rahul Gandhi has the guts to tell him that he doesn’t understand. He mocks PM Narendra Modi’s ideas when CEO of the world’s leading company endorses them,” Goyal said on Twitter and shared a link about use of turbine to generate drinking water from humid air.

S&T Minister Harsh Vardhan wondered how a parliamentarian, who claimed to have been to the world’s best university, does not know that PSU Bharat Electronics Limited had unveiled an atmospheric water generator at Aero India 2019.

The minister added that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research had developed this technology and commercialised it long ago.

“They say ignorance is bliss, but rarely in Indian politics has an individual made a conscious effort to sustain his ignorance. It seems the real danger to the Congress flourishes unabashedly and no one seems to have the guts to tell the Yuvraj otherwise,” Textiles Minister Smriti Irani said.

M Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, without any reference to Rahul’s comments, said that the Prime Minister’s ideas using the wind turbines in generating water from moisture in the air for coastal areas and separating oxygen from the air were technically feasible.

“Ministry of Earth Sciences would like to work on some of these technologies for deriving water from the atmosphere,” Rajeevan said.