Veolia opens India disaster hub as climate risks mount, commits over €1 million globally to emergency response

Veolia is expanding its emergency response capabilities in Asia by opening a new VeoliaForce Hub in New Delhi, as climate-related disasters rise and water security becomes an urgent concern. The hub will accommodate mobile water-treatment units and train an initial group of 25 employees to deploy and manage them in disaster-affected areas throughout South and Southeast Asia. In this conversation with The Economic Times Digital, David Poinard, Executive Officer, Veolia Foundation and Guillaume Dourdin, CEO, Veolia India discuss the investment behind the initiative, the role of businesses in building climate resilience, and how India could become a regional base for emergency water infrastructure manufacturing. Edited excerpts.


Economic Times (ET): Why has Veolia chosen New Delhi as the base for its new Asia-Pacific VeoliaForce Hub, and what specific capabilities and investments are you putting in place to make India a regional centre for emergency response across South and Southeast Asia?


David Poinard (DP): The Veolia Foundation expands its reach wherever Veolia teams are present. Why? Because our humanitarian action relies directly on Veolia employees who, after completing training alongside us, are made available by their managers to deploy via skills-based sponsorship. As a Foundation, we identify the needs of our humanitarian partners and provide the resources to meet them. So why New Delhi? Because we have deeply committed Veolia teams here that we can fully rely on. As for what we are putting in place, it involves both human and material resources. Human resources mean the Veolia employees who volunteer to take part in the Foundation’s actions. Material resources refer to the specialized equipment designed by the Foundation specifically for humanitarian contexts-more specifically, mobile water treatment units that can be deployed within hours to meet the needs of thousands of people.

Guillaume Dourdin (GD): We need to be close to the areas where this material and these volunteers may be deployed. That is the reason we are opening different hubs around the world to cover different geographies. Delhi's central location in the Asian zone and excellent connectivity allow us to deploy our volunteers and equipment easily to areas needing support.

The capabilities we are building here are, obviously, to have pre-positioned plants that can produce drinking water, but also to have a place where we can train the volunteers. We will start with 25 people who are currently being trained and will be certified as operators for these emergency plants, so that we can deploy the equipment and volunteers to any place that requires support.

These are employees of Veolia here who have their current jobs. When they are mobilised, they will be shifted with the containers, set up the plants and operate the facility.


ET: In terms of specific capabilities, what are these containers capable of doing, and what is the capacity?

GD: These are portable drinking water plants. The idea is to build a mini water-treatment plant that can treat any water source you find, such as a river, and make it potable. Teams can deploy these plants in just a few hours.

They are skid-mounted, so you come with the container, open it, assemble the plant, and then you are able to produce water. We have different capacities, for example, 2 m3 / hour production of treated water, which is can serve 20 litre per day per person. For the size, it is 150 cm in height and 60 cm in width.


ET: Will this team be deployed in places where Veolia does not have an operation?

GD: Absolutely. Usually, the Veolia Foundation will work with partners such as the Red Cross and UNHCR, and they will be the front end of the request. When a disaster strikes, the government, local government or local authority will request support, for example, from the Red Cross, and the Red Cross will then get in touch with the Veolia Foundation for us to provide support on providing drinking water.

The reason we work with partners is because the volunteers are not professional disaster managers. We therefore need to be backed by somebody who can manage the overall situation of a disaster. That is why we work with reputable partners. We provide our expertise, our machines, and our people, who are experts in drinking-water operations.


ET: -India is facing increasing variability in water availability, with the IMD forecasting below-normal monsoon rainfall for 2026 at 92% of the long-period average. How is Veolia thinking about investing in emergency water infrastructure, mobile treatment capacity and other resources to respond to droughts, floods and water-stress events?

GD: Our purpose is to help the communities in which we operate. Both municipalities and industries, face their environmental challenges, and we increasingly see through events like drought, floods, excessive heat that being able to provide long-term solutions for environmental security is critical. Most of the projects we do serve that purpose.

The water projects we are doing in Mumbai, for example, are intended to make Mumbai ready for the future in terms of water supply. The projects we are working on today to reuse water for industrial applications will help the ecosystem work better because they reduce pressure on water resources by reusing water rather than relying only on fresh water.

Our focus is usually on that type of long-term action. When we do a project locally, we also invest in the local community. The VeoliaForce initiative is one form of support we bring to the community. We also work closely with our customers, including municipalities, to train people. We are not just there to operate; there is also a transfer of knowledge happening with the customer to help them better understand and address environmental challenges.

DP: Yes, the world is changing rapidly, and current developments are rather concerning: geopolitical, climate, and financial challenges are putting heavy pressure on development and humanitarian aid. Crises are becoming more intense, more frequent, and some are lasting longer.

To cope with this, we must prepare, train, and get to know one another better. This is precisely what is at stake with our international hubs and for Veolia as a whole.

On our own, we cannot do everything, nor should we wait for crises to strike. We all have a crucial role to play: political leaders and local authorities, businesses, and civil society. We must take full responsibility for our actions and their impacts on the environment and on future generations.

Our strategy centers on anticipation and preparedness. The investments were made upstream so that the Aquaforces—the mobile water treatment units I mentioned—are available on site. Our investment also means continuously training Veolia staff to ensure we maintain a permanent pool of ready-to-deploy Veoliaforce volunteers at all times.

This represents an investment of over one million euros over two years in equipment and training. It should be noted that the volunteers participate during their working hours and the initiative is funded entirely by the Veolia Group, rather than its foundation.


ET: Given what you have seen over the last five years or a decade, and how erratic climate change is at the moment, do you think such climate behaviour is here to stay? If that is the case, what does it do to your business? And, in terms of what you have announced today with VeoliaForce, how important are local partnerships and what operations do you need to put on the ground?

GD: I think, for me, the impact of what we see now is here to stay. It means that we have to plan and prepare to be more adaptable rather than thinking this will go away by itself. Unfortunately, even though more people are becoming conscious of the need to take care of the environment and preserve resources, the impact of the past is there and is going to last.

It means we increasingly have to build resilient systems that can operate under stress conditions. That means infrastructure and facilities able to operate under stress, but more importantly, people trained to operate them. That is where a company like Veolia, which can mobilise experts across its operations, can help. We do not need to have everybody on the ground; when we have a problem, we can call for support from the Group and experts around the world can bring something to the table. It is very difficult and expensive for one municipality or one customer to build that capability on its own. Sharing experiences and solutions can therefore help many of the clients we support.


ET: In terms of effective preparedness, what does it look like on the ground? You have mentioned partnering with agencies like the Red Cross. How important are local expertise, trained personnel and pre-positioned resources for faster response?

GD: That is exactly the point of this Hub. Tomorrow, when you have a disaster in this region, being already on the ground here, with equipment pre-positioned here and within a radius of a few hours of flight, makes a difference.

But not only the equipment: the people to operate it are extremely important. It is very important to train those volunteers so that they can be immediately efficient when they hit the ground. Today, I think we will have two plants positioned here.

Twenty-five operators may seem like a lot, but in fact it is not enough. The 25 are the first batch of people we are going to train, but the Hub will also serve to continue training more people. When you respond to a disaster situation, you have to be able to plan your action for the long term. You cannot have a few people operating plants 24x7 every day for weeks or months. You need to plan for rotation of teams so that you can continue to support the response. That is why 25 is the start; we will need more people to be truly resilient in emergency response.


ET: What role can businesses play in climate resilience beyond the financial contributions we see in CSR activity, particularly when it comes to technical expertise, technology, employee skills and operational capabilities?

GD: It is at the heart of the business to provide solutions for improving the environmental security of our communities. All the businesses we do, whether in water, waste or energy, are aimed at improving water supply, dealing better with waste, and providing cleaner and more efficient energy. When we do that, we invest in facilities and in optimising them.

We also bring innovation developed within the Group, including more efficient processes, better ways to recycle, recover materials, improve energy consumption, reuse water or carry out desalination. This innovation comes through our network of researchers and the 5,000 plants we operate across the world. There is a lot of small, day-to-day innovation that is built in different places and that we can copy and adapt to different situations.

Innovation is not only about a big technological breakthrough; it is also about incremental innovation that makes us more efficient. The last part is training. We spend a lot of time training our people to become better operators. Some leave and go to other companies and disseminate good practices. It is unfortunate because we train them, but positive because overall it increases the level of the industry.

Through the exchange we have with our customers, we also help them build capacity. A large municipality such as Mumbai has the means and resources to have skilled people, whereas smaller municipalities have many responsibilities and their civil servants cannot be experts in everything. By working with us, we help them improve and skill up.


ET: Beyond responding after a disaster, can the Delhi hub play a role in building long-term resilience, for example, helping cities and communities prepare for water scarcity, improve sanitation and strengthen emergency-response systems? What partnerships with governments, NGOs and local authorities are you looking to build in India?

DP: The Delhi humanitarian hub focuses primarily on humanitarian responses. But that’s right—and thank you for asking—the Veolia Foundation does more than that. We support projects related to environmental protection, biodiversity, social inclusion, and development (water, sanitation, energy, and waste management). Water and sanitation issues have an impact on health. Specifically, we are supporting a project in Gujarat to provide free medical care to 20,000 people, in partnership with the Wockhardt Foundation. The project is simple: a bus, a driver, a doctor, and a Veolia employee (providing pro bono expertise). Veolia provides solutions to combat waterborne diseases and offers advice and solutions on issues related to the WASH sector (water, sanitation, and hygiene).

Please note, we cannot do everything on our own; we must work with local authorities. We cannot replace them, as they are responsible for providing the short, medium, and long-term vision for the overall development of these regions.


ET: Where do you see the long-term plans for what you have announced today? What could it look like around innovation and best practices, especially because emergency response in this region might be very different from what you have in Europe?

GD: If I first look at the business overall, there is a lot we can do in India to continue improving infrastructure. In our last conversation, I told you we are looking at more than doubling our revenue in India. All of that will be in businesses that support the country in achieving its environmental goals and becoming more resilient to environmental issues.

The Indian market is very different, and there are a lot of things we can bring back from here to support the rest of our operations outside India. For VeoliaForce, it will be the same. This is a first Hub, with 25 people. I expect this to expand further, and we will likely discover new methods to handle disasters here by building on previous actions.

The second point is that we are also in discussion with the Foundation to see whether we could take advantage of Make in India to not only be a pre-positioning place with volunteers but also a place where we can manufacture these plants for the rest of the region. The conversation has started because we have design engineers here who can help optimise them. We can potentially build them at lower cost and faster in a lot of places. All of this is gradually an evolution to provide more support to the Veolia Foundation so that it can be more effective and responsive in terms of all this assistance.