“Drinking water comes under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955. There have been cases where the government has acquired farmers' wells to enable the supply of drinking water, even as the farmers' own crops dried up. So how can the government justify diverting electricity meant for pumping drinking water to the industry?"

This logical poser by Vidya Haribhau Deshmukh (37), the sarpanch (village council head), of village Datala had the administration of the Buldhana district of Maharashtra utterly stumped. In the rural areas of Vidarbha, long hours of load-shedding - in some places around 12 to 14 hours a day - have severely affected the supply of drinking and irrigation water.

Vidyatai, as she is known in the village, ('tai' means 'elder sister' in Marathi) has become the first sarpanch to have successfully secured increased electricity supply for her village. In the process, she has set an important political precedent in a region where anger is simmering over the unfair distribution of electricity in the urban and rural areas.

The seriousness of the problem can be gauged from the fact that in the previous crop season, farmers had taken out massive demonstrations demanding sufficient electricity supply. In fact, the residents of village Ladegaon in Washim district went to the extreme of not paying their electricity bills for the last six years to protest against  insufficient and erratic power supply.

Datala, on the Malkapur-Buldhana road, is a large village and a local trade centre with a population of around 8,500. According to Vidyatai, there is no dearth of drinking water in the village at present.

"But last year, two industrial units belonging to politically well-connected people came up quite close to the village and the power supply, which was quite regular till then, was diverted to these units.

Initially, Vidyatai, who became the sarpanch on an open (unreserved) seat about 18 months ago, decided to start supplying water through tankers - the stock answer to the rural water crisis in Vidarbha.

But this did not work out: Fights would break out among villagers gathered around the tankers and the tanker service had to be stopped. But then the situation worsened. "The protests grew louder and louder, and people seemed to think that I was the culprit," she says.

"As a sarpanch and a woman," says she, "I have had to face rejection and non-cooperation from the male panchayat (village council) members and government officials. I have had to fight corruption at various levels. However, this was not a case of corruption but of government policy."

After much thought, Vidyatai formulated a two-pronged strategy. "On the one hand, I began to talk to the women in the village, preparing them for an agitation which could extend over a period of time. On the other, I began to study the subject from all possible angles," she recalls.

Through extensive research, Vidyatai formulated her argument under the Essential Commodities Act. "I began to send applications to all officials at the block and district level. Officials, who earlier had ignored my pleas, now began to sit up and pay attention," she says. But even two months later, there was no sign of things becoming better.

Fearing a stalemate, Vidyatai approached the officials once again. But this time around, she announced that there would be full-blown agitation if their demand were not met. In May, as the situation threatened to get out of hand, the local MLA, Chainsukh Sancheti, intervened.

In the last week of May, the three-phase power supply to the village went up to 12 hours, and in early June, a sum of Rs 750,000 was sanctioned for laying an express feeder line for the village, on which work has already begun.