In Maharashtra, 20,000 villages are in acute drought, a situation described by the water supply and sanitation minister Laxman Dhoble as “very, very critical.” In May it could turn ugly, he told reporters in Nagpur on April 29.

The situation is worst in Vidarbha’s 3400 villages, as almost all the major reservoirs in the district are running at dead storage levels, from where the water can’t be lifted into the streams. Yavatmal is the worst hit. Here, two of the 3 major dams have zero water storage at this time, and there’s May to go.

A failed 2009 monsoon in Vidarbha came on the heels of two bad monsoons. Yavatmal’s long-term average annual rainfall is 911 mm. In 2009, it received less than 450 mm of erratic rains in small spells. In 2007, it got 844 mm rainfall, and in 2008, 633 mm or 70 per cent of the average. “What we face in the middle of March every year, we were facing in October last,” says the district collector Sanjay Deshmukh.