The Netherlands built its global reputation by keeping water out. Now, longer dry spells and intensifying heatwaves are forcing the country to confront a very different problem: how to keep enough fresh water in the landscape. From greenhouse agriculture to homes built on wooden foundation piles, the Netherlands drought challenge is exposing the limits of infrastructure designed primarily for flood protection.

When people think of the Netherlands, the images that come to mind are windmills, tulip fields and the great sea walls that have kept the ocean at bay for centuries. The Dutch built their reputation, and much of their nation, on mastering water — pumping it away, holding it back, and reclaiming land from the sea to build a prosperous country on ground that, by rights, shouldn’t exist. Yet beneath that carefully engineered landscape, the Netherlands is now facing an unfamiliar problem: it is running out of fresh water.

As repeated summer heatwaves sweep across Western Europe, Dutch water authorities say they have reached the limit of what engineering can do. In several regions, officials have exhausted every standard measure available to them and are left with what amounts to a last resort — waiting, and hoping, for rain.

Netherlands Drought Challenge: From Floods to Water Scarcity

To understand how a country famous for its rainfall and rivers has arrived at this point, it helps to look at how the land itself was designed. For generations, the Dutch water system had one job: get excess water out to sea as fast as possible, to prevent flooding. That same efficiency has become a liability as weather patterns shift towards longer dry spells and more intense heat. The pressure peaks in late summer, when temperatures regularly cross 35°C and water evaporates faster than rainfall can replace it.

The consequences of shrinking water reserves go well beyond the daily weather report. They are already reaching into the economy, and into the foundations — quite literally — of Dutch homes.

Thousands of historic Dutch houses stand on wooden foundation piles. When groundwater levels drop, those piles are exposed to air and begin to rot. On clay and peat soils, the ground shrinks unevenly, pulling foundations down and cracking brick walls

Economic Strain and Sinking Homes

In Westland, the heart of Dutch greenhouse horticulture, the Delfland water authority has banned growers from drawing irrigation water from local ditches and canals — the first such ban in its history. According to the growers’ umbrella body Glastuinbouw Nederland, the ban affects around 150 commercial growers, with potential damages running as high as €150 million.

At the same time, a quieter crisis is unfolding beneath people’s homes. Thousands of historic Dutch houses stand on wooden foundation piles. When groundwater levels drop, those piles are exposed to air and begin to rot. On clay and peat soils, the ground shrinks unevenly, pulling foundations down and cracking brick walls. The Council for the Living Environment and Infrastructure estimates that close to half a million buildings across the country could show foundation damage by 2035, with repair costs reaching as much as €54 billion.

From Water Battle to Water Sponge

This reality is forcing a fundamental shift in how the Netherlands manages its resources. For centuries, Dutch policy was simple: fight the water, and push it away. Today, water authorities are engaged in a delicate balancing act, trying to save every drop using canal locks and storage basins. But holding onto existing water can only do so much once the rain stops altogether.

Long-term resilience will require redesigning the landscape itself. Rather than treating rainwater as a threat to be flushed out to sea, experts increasingly argue that the Netherlands needs to function more like a giant sponge — capturing heavy winter rain and storing it safely to survive the dry summer months that are becoming the norm.

A Lesson Beyond Borders

What is unfolding in the Netherlands carries a lesson well beyond it. If a nation this experienced in water engineering is struggling to keep pace with a changing climate, it says something about how quickly conditions can outrun even the most sophisticated infrastructure. As riverbeds stay low and the dry spells drag on, the Dutch find themselves in an unfamiliar position for a country built on water: waiting for the skies to open.

India’s urban labour market continues to show a persistent gender imbalance, even as overall employment trends remain relatively stable. While unemployment rates are often used as the primary indicator of job stress, they do not fully capture who is able to access work in the first place.

India’s latest employment data reveal a divide larger than the headline unemployment rate. In April–June 2026, 8.7% of urban women aged 15 years and above who were in the labour force were unemployed, compared with 6.1% of urban men. But the sharper gap lies in employment itself: only 22.8% of urban women were working, compared with 70.7% of urban men.

The figures come as India’s overall unemployment rate rose to 5.4%, from 5.0% in January–March, according to the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Quarterly Bulletin released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Rural unemployment rose from 4.3% to 4.8%, while urban unemployment remained almost unchanged at 6.7%.

For urban women, unemployment actually fell from 9.1% to 8.7% over the quarter. Yet it remains considerably higher than the rate for men.

That makes the story less about a sudden rise in female unemployment and more about a persistent question: why are so few urban women participating in paid work?

The Bigger Divide is Participation

The unemployment rate counts people who are working or actively seeking and available for work. Those outside the labour force are not counted as unemployed.

That distinction is crucial. The urban Worker Population Ratio (WPR) stood at 46.8% overall in April–June. But the gender gap was stark: 70.7% for men and just 22.8% for women.

The nearly 48-percentage-point difference means that looking only at the 8.7% female unemployment rate captures only part of the employment problem. India can therefore have a relatively stable urban unemployment rate while still having a large pool of women who are not participating in the labour market.

Urban Jobs are Changing, But the Gender Gap Remains

The urban labour market itself is not showing signs of a broad collapse. Urban unemployment edged up only marginally from 6.6% to 6.7% during the quarter. At the same time, the share of urban workers in regular wage or salaried employment increased from 48.9% to 49.3%.

Urban employment is also dominated by services. The tertiary sector accounted for 62% of urban employment in April–June, compared with 61.7% a year earlier.

Yet these shifts have not translated into comparable employment outcomes for women.

Rural Unemployment Rose Faster

The national increase in unemployment was partly driven by rural India. Rural unemployment rose by 0.5 percentage points, compared with a 0.1-point increase in urban areas. At the same time, rural employment continued to shift away from agriculture: agriculture’s share fell from 55.8% to 52.9%, while the secondary sector rose from 22.6% to 24.4%.

The figures point to an economy undergoing changes in where and how people work, even as access to employment remains uneven.

Women’s Participation Also Fell

The gender gap extends beyond cities. Overall female labour-force participation declined from 34.7% in January–March to 33.2% in April–June. The overall LFPR for people aged 15 and above also fell, from 55.5% to 54.6%.

The latest figures should not be interpreted as proof that women simply lost jobs. LFPR measures participation in the labour force, while WPR measures actual employment.

But together, the indicators highlight a persistent challenge: India’s employment story cannot be understood through unemployment alone.

The Question of Gender Gap

The PLFS does not establish why urban women participate in the labour market at much lower rates than men. Factors such as childcare, household responsibilities, transport, workplace conditions, safety and access to suitable jobs require separate evidence and reporting.

What the data do establish is the scale of the divide. Urban female unemployment is 8.7%, compared with 6.1% for men. But the much larger gap is in actual employment: 22.8% of urban women were working, against 70.7% of urban men.

As India’s urban economy becomes increasingly service-led and regular salaried employment expands, the central employment question is no longer only how many jobs are being created. It is also who is able to enter the workforce and stay in it.

Second Act is Education Publica’s column on professionals who reinvent themselves after retirement or at major turning points in life. In the previous issue, former Bell Labs researcher Sudhir M. Ambedkar recounted his journey from IIT Bombay and the University of California, Berkeley to nearly three decades of research and innovation at Bell Labs. In this concluding part, he reflects on how retirement opened the door to an equally rewarding second career—as a mathematics teacher, mentor and lifelong learner.

In the previous part of my story, I described how retirement led me to pursue certification as a high school mathematics teacher after my career at Bell Labs. Standing in a classroom for the first time as a teacher marked the beginning of an entirely new chapter in my life.

After completing my certification, I taught mathematics full-time for about seven years. Teaching mathematics in the United States was a new experience for me, and it took some time to adjust to a different way of teaching. While teaching, I learned a few things about some fundamental mathematics concepts that I had never thought about before.

I used a hybrid approach, combining the Indian method and the American method of teaching mathematics. During my tenure as a teacher, I made several observations about the education system where I was teaching, although many of them were generally applicable to the education system in New Jersey as well. I documented those observations in a white paper and sent them to a few education professors at major universities. Some agreed with my observations but said I could not publish the paper in an academic journal because I was not an education researcher.

One observation was the amount of repetition in the curriculum across Algebra I, Algebra II and Pre-Calculus. I felt it would be better to build a stronger foundation in the earlier stages rather than repeat many of the same topics in subsequent courses.

I also noticed that calculators were introduced in very early grades. As a result, many students became overly dependent on them and often lacked the ability to perform mental mathematics. I believe it is important to build a strong understanding of basic mathematical operations and concepts—including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and solving equations—before relying heavily on technology.

The mathematics textbooks used in American schools are excellent. They contain colourful illustrations, graphics and worked examples that make concepts easier to understand. At the same time, students often expected teachers to explain every step in detail, rather than working through some of the reasoning independently.

Another aspect that interested me was the grading system. Homework and classwork accounted for a significant portion of students’ grades, while tests and quizzes carried comparatively less weight. In my opinion, this did not always accurately reflect a student’s mathematical skills and knowledge.

The students hardly ever received failing grades, and almost everyone progressed to the next level. On one occasion, I was under pressure to pass a student so that the school could maintain a 100 per cent graduation rate—a highly valued performance indicator.

These observations are not intended as criticism of the education system, but simply to illustrate how it differed from the one I had experienced in India. Bright students always rise to the top in this system as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed teaching, and it was gratifying to see students succeed and gain admission to excellent universities. Unlike research, where results often take years to become visible, I could see the impact of my work immediately.

After about seven years of teaching, I underwent knee surgery. As a result, I gave up classroom teaching and began focusing more seriously on preparing students for the SAT and ACT, the standardised tests widely used for college admissions in the United States.

I worked with two learning centres that referred students to me for SAT and ACT coaching. Over the years, both examinations changed considerably in their format and content, so I had to keep up with those changes and adjust my teaching accordingly.

Initially, I taught students in person. During the COVID-19 pandemic, all instruction shifted to Zoom. Even after the pandemic, I continued teaching online because, since most of my classes were one-to-one, I found Zoom to be both efficient and physically less demanding.

As a result of teaching these examinations, I developed several practical strategies that enabled students to complete the tests accurately within the allotted time. Some students later told me they found these strategies useful not only in the SAT and ACT but also in their regular mathematics and English classes.

I eventually published these strategies as a series of guidebooks on Amazon. The feedback from students and parents has been consistently encouraging.

In terms of years, my teaching career has now lasted about 75 per cent as long as my engineering career. In both professions, I could see the results of my work, but teaching has been more gratifying because I had direct contact with the people who benefited from it.

I expect to continue this second career for as long as possible.

Sudhir M. Ambedkar is a mechanical engineer trained at IIT Bombay and the University of California, Berkeley. He spent nearly three decades at Bell Labs working in telecommunications research and development. After retirement, he became a certified mathematics teacher and now tutors students preparing for the SAT and ACT while authoring test-preparation guides.