Maharashtra’s water supply department has told every district to start listing the villages and hamlets likely to run dry, with the first lists due in October. The scarcity action plan it ordered on 17 September runs from October 2026 to June 2027. Marathwada starts that clock from a worse position than usual. The region ended the monsoon about 30 per cent short of its normal rain, and one of its major dams has nothing left in it.
What the order asks for
The plan is a calendar, not a relief package. Tehsildars and block development officers must build the village lists together, backed by gram panchayat resolutions and the last three years of scarcity spending, then hand them to collectors in stages: 15 November, 20 December and 20 January. A village that is fine in November may not be fine in February. The staggering exists so the paperwork lands before the borewell fails rather than after.
Of the ten permitted scarcity measures, officials must attempt nine first: deepening wells, repairing existing schemes, taking over private sources. Tankers come last. Where a district does hire tankers, the GPS condition must now sit inside the tender document and the contract, rather than arriving later as a departmental instruction. The order also bars new wells within 500 metres of a public drinking water source and lets an officer suspend groundwater extraction within a kilometre of one, if that source is being drawn down.
Tanker supply is the most expensive line in any scarcity budget and the easiest to inflate, because a trip that never ran looks the same on paper as one that did. Writing the tracker into the tender turns the billing check into something a clerk can run without anyone’s permission.
Why Marathwada is the test case
The eight Marathwada districts received 388.3 mm of rain from 1 June against a normal of 552.2 mm. September, which often rescues the season here, delivered 5.2 mm against a normal of 38.7 mm in its first week. Latur finished at 57.3 per cent of normal, Parbhani at 54.6 per cent.
Storage followed. The region’s eleven major projects held 123.32 TMC, about 67.73 per cent of capacity, against 176.30 TMC and 96.82 per cent on the same date last year. Sina Kolegaon in Dharashiv sits at zero. Manjara in Beed holds 12.26 per cent, and Nimna Dudhna in Parbhani has dropped to 22.49 per cent from 74.67 per cent a year ago. Divisional Commissioner G Shreekant has said the available water goes to drinking supply alone, with no rabi allocation planned and patrol teams seizing illegal lifting pumps.
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar sits better than the districts around it. Jayakwadi was still just over 83 per cent full in mid-September, which covers the city’s drinking supply through the summer. The farmers downstream who were counting on a rabi release get nothing from that number.
What this means on the ground
If you are on a piped municipal supply, nothing changes this month. The squeeze arrives later and unevenly: cancelled rabi water first, then longer gaps between supply days, and a tanker only in the villages that reached the collector’s list.
Watch whether your village or wadi appears on that October list. Being left off is the failure that costs the most. A settlement missing from the October list is not shut out in April, but it waits longer, because someone has to raise and clear a fresh proposal while people are already queuing at the well. Gram panchayat resolutions are how a village gets on, and October is when they count.
Outlook
Maharashtra’s own rainfall picture was not bad everywhere. The state ran about 12 per cent below normal from June to August, after a July surplus of 40 per cent that an August deficit of 46 per cent wiped out. Madhya Maharashtra finished near normal. The shortfall is concentrated, which is why a statewide circular has gone out for what is mostly a Marathwada and Vidarbha problem.
Mark two dates. The 15 November list shows how many villages the administration expects to be in trouble. The 20 January list shows how far off that first estimate was, and the distance between the two is the clearest early read on this summer.
Sources: Prahaar, Navarashtra, The Federal, National Herald, The Week
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.