The Water Warrior: How Garima Mittal Is Engineering a More Sustainable Future, One Drop at a Time

SheSight Cover Feature | An Expert Voices Conversation with Dr. CeeVee

There are engineers who build infrastructure, and then there are engineers who build futures. Garima Mittal belongs firmly to the second category.

Currently Technical Director at Arcadis, Garima brings over three decades of experience in water, wastewater, desalination, and industrial projects spanning the UK, Australia, Chile, Singapore, and India. A Chartered Engineer (UK), Fellow of the IET, and PMP certified professional, she has held key leadership roles at organisations including Tata Consulting Engineers and Black & Veatch. But numbers and titles only tell part of her story. What makes Garima remarkable is the philosophy she has quietly built over thirty years: that engineering, at its best, is never just about pipelines and treatment plants. It is about the communities those pipelines and plants serve.

From Problem Solving to Purpose

Garima entered engineering, she told me, because she loved solving problems. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. She stopped seeing water treatment plants as infrastructure and started seeing them as lifelines for the people who depended on them.

“The moment I realised that engineering can have a lasting impact on future generations, it became less of a profession and more of a purpose,” she said.

Her career began in India at Tata Consulting Engineers, where she had the rare opportunity to follow projects from concept to commissioning, speaking directly with clients and site teams, and witnessing firsthand the communities affected by water scarcity. That grounding, she believes, gave her a resilience and resourcefulness that her later global roles only sharpened further. Where her Indian experience taught her to do more with less, her international exposure broadened her understanding of diverse technologies, regulatory frameworks, and long term planning. Today, she sees the flow of learning moving in both directions, with Indian firms absorbing global best practice even as they begin to shape it themselves.

A Childhood Dream, Quietly Persistent

Garima’s path to engineering was not a dramatic one. It was, instead, the story of a young girl who wanted to do something meaningful for society, encouraged by a father who had once dreamed of becoming an engineer himself but could not, due to financial constraints. That unfulfilled dream became a quiet inheritance, passed from father to daughter.

While her college peers moved abroad to pursue other fields, Garima was among a small minority, by her own estimate, only about ten percent of her graduating class, who stayed in India to build a career in core engineering. It was a choice that set the tone for everything that followed.

The Lone Woman in the Room

Perhaps the most striking thread running through our conversation was Garima’s relationship with voice, and the courage to use it. Early in her career, she often found herself the only woman in rooms filled with senior engineers, contractors, and municipal decision makers. She was told, more than once, to stay quiet and let things be.

She refused.

“If I don’t voice it out, I am doing a disservice to the communities it is serving,” she said. “People are complaining that they are not getting adequate water supply. There is a solution. Why not do it?”

This conviction cost her comfort at times. Contractors grew wary of her exacting standards. She would not clear a project until she was satisfied, ethically and technically. In one memorable moment, she later learned that her father’s own friend, a client on one of her projects, had wanted her to skip an inspection as a favour to a contractor. Word came back instead that Garima Mittal would not be swayed. Her father, she recalled, was quietly proud.

That early lesson, that being the only woman in the room is precisely why your voice matters, has stayed with her ever since.

Watch the full podcast of Ms.Garima Mittal with Dr.CeeVee , Founder of SheSight Global on YouTube

Water and the Missing Climate Conversation

When our conversation turned to climate change, Garima offered a reframing that deserves wider attention. Most public discourse fixates on carbon emissions, she noted, while water, arguably the resource through which most people actually experience climate change, remains underdiscussed. Scarcity, flooding, deteriorating water quality, and rising demand from population growth are all converging pressures, and in her view, climate change is as much a water management story as it is a carbon story.

She was also candid about who bears the heaviest burden of water scarcity, particularly in rural India, where women are often responsible for fetching water and managing households under conditions of chronic shortage. Rather than framing this only as hardship, Garima chose to highlight agency: women in villages across India who have taken it upon themselves to approach local governments, advocate for piped water and treatment infrastructure, and become what she affectionately calls “water warriors” in their own communities.

A Flagship Project Born of Drought

Among the many projects Garima has led, one stands out as a defining moment in her career: a wastewater recycling scheme in Brisbane, undertaken during Australia’s severe drought in the mid-2000s. Faced with the impossible choice between diverting clean water to power stations or to communities, the Queensland government, in partnership with Black & Veatch, developed a scheme to treat wastewater to drinking water standards using membrane filtration, UV treatment, and reverse osmosis, freeing up existing clean water for the community instead of the power grid.

Garima designed the instrumentation and control systems for the project, delivered in a demanding ten month timeline, and later worked across multiple phases of the scheme. It became an award winning flagship project, and for her, a formative lesson in what sustainability actually means in practice: a genuine balance of social, economic, and environmental outcomes, embedded from the very outset of a project rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

On Balance, Boundaries, and Dance

Away from engineering, Garima spoke candidly about the toll a demanding, decades long career can take, including health challenges early on that forced her to rethink how she worked. Her solution was a discipline she has stuck to since: limiting herself to one or two intensive stretch days a week, protecting weekends for family, and refusing to let work and personal life blur into one another.

One of her great joys, she shared, is dance, a passion she never had space for as a child, when all her energy went into becoming, in her words, “a good engineer and a good person.” Now, she makes time for it deliberately, often alongside her daughter, describing it not as a pursuit of excellence but simply as joy.

Her reflections on motherhood carried a similarly quiet conviction. Rather than raising her daughter with a narrative of sacrifice, Garima has chosen to model a life lived fully and happily, on the belief that daughters learn more from watching their mothers thrive than from hearing about what was given up for them.

Her Message to the Next Generation

Asked what advice she would offer young women considering engineering, particularly amid uncertainty about AI’s impact on the profession, Garima’s response was unequivocal: do not wait to see if the industry is ready for you. Focus instead on whether you are ready for it. Stay technically excellent, stay curious, and above all, find your voice.

“Never underestimate the impact of your presence,” she said. “Success lies in your own hands. Nobody else will pitch in for you. You have to be your biggest advocate.”

It is a fitting close to a conversation with a woman who has spent thirty years proving exactly that, one project, one voice, one drop of water at a time.

Garima Mittal is Technical Director at Arcadis and a respected voice with IET Mumbai and AWWA on sustainable water infrastructure and diversity in engineering. She is also one of the Mumbai Leadership Council members of ShePower Club. This conversation was recorded for the SheSight Podcast with host Dr CeeVee.

This interview was originally featured on SheSight Magazine’s ShePower Special Podcast. For more inspiring stories of women breaking barriers and creating change, visit our podcast series.

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