Sixty per cent of India is underlain by salty water - and much of that area is not served by an electric grid that could run conventional reverse-osmosis desalination plants.
An analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers Natasha Wright and Amos Winter shows that a different desalination technology called electrodialysis, powered by solar panels, could provide enough clean, palatable drinking water to supply the needs of a typical village.
Finding optimal solutions to problems such as saline groundwater involves "detective work to understand the full set of constraints imposed by the market," said Winter.
The factors that point to the choice of electrodialysis in India include both relatively low levels of salinity - ranging from 500 to 3,000 milligrammes per litre, compared with seawater at about 35,000 mg/L - as well as the region's lack of electrical power.
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Such moderately salty water is not directly toxic, but it can have long-term effects on health, and its unpleasant taste can cause people to turn to other, dirtier water sources.
By pairing village-scale electrodialysis systems with a simple set of solar panels and a battery system to store the produced energy, an economically viable and culturally acceptable system could supply enough water to meet the needs of a village of 2,000 to 5,000 people, researchers concluded.
They estimate that deployment of such systems would double the area of India in which groundwater - which is inherently safer, in terms of pathogen loads, than surface water - could provide acceptable drinking water.
While many homes in India currently use individual, home-based filtration systems to treat their water, Wright and Winter concluded that village-scale systems would be more effective - both because fewer people would be left out of access to clean water, and because home-based systems are much harder to monitor to ensure effective water treatment.