For Ashok Pawar this summer could not be more different from the last one. Around this time last year, he had to get drinking water from a source 10 km from his village Tippatwadi in Beed district of central Maharashtra —and finding water for his 4.5 acre farm was even harder. There was poor rainfall two years in a row and the situation got very grim. Then it rained so much in 2016, particularly in October, that Pawar’s cotton crop was destroyed.But the lean 25-year-old is not too unhappy because now there is enough water in his well and he has already harvested his jowar (sorghum) crop. He supplements his fluctuating farm income with the more stable earnings from his sugarcane juice stall which stands between the road and his fields. The shop fetches him a profit of Rs 50,000 between March and May.The Marathwada region, of which Beed is one of eight districts, receives an average rainfall of 683 mm, 30% lower than the country as a whole and, as a result, is susceptible to droughts. According to a study by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the Indian Institute of Science, between 1870 and 2015 the region faced 22 droughts, of which there were five instances of two consecutive droughts, the most recent of which were in 2014-15 and 2015-16. Marathwada had a rain deficit of 40% in both 2014 and 2015.In the summer of 2016, Marathwada was repeatedly in the news for a crippling water shortage. “I can’t even think of those days,” says Naval Kishore Ram, district collector of Beed, which receives the lowest annual average rainfall in Marathwada. Every day around 750 tankers carried roughly 24,000 litres of water each to the district’s 2.7 million people, three-fourths of whom live in villages.“We used to get water once in 12 days,” says Santosh Kashid, a farmer and resident of Beed city. Summers in Marathwada can get quite hot, with the average temperature over 410 Celsius; Parbhani, part of the region, hit 460 Celsius in May 2016. A heat wave in Maharashtra claimed two lives earlier this week, one of them in Aurangabad district.A new farm pond in Palwan village of Beed district, built under Jalyukt Shivar in NovemberThe situation in Latur, 135 km southeast of Beed, was even worse, with the government getting water by train from 240 km away. But this season, the administration in neither Beed nor Latur has had to resort to tankers. Moreover, government-funded fodder camps for cattle which dotted the region last year (Beed alone had 260) are not to be seen now.The rains last year laid waste to soybean and cotton, but also resulted in a very good harvest of tur dal (pigeon pea), which in turn led to a glut in the market and a fall in prices; the government has been forced to procure more than planned. In 2014, the latest year for which data is available, cotton and soybean were the most preferred kharif crops (grown in June-October), accounting for a third and a fourth of the area, respectively, and jowar constituted less than half the area in rabi season (October-March).While water availability is not a problem right now, the fact that only a fifth of Marathwada’s land is irrigated (less than half of the all-India average) still poses a huge problem. What’s more, micro irrigation, which is more water-efficient than surface irrigation and which could be drip or sprinkler irrigation, is even rarer in the region. Just over 6% of Beed’s agri lands have micro-irrigation facilities.Ashok Pawar with his father Rajaram PawarRam says Jalyukt Shivar, an ambitious state government programme launched in 2014 to make Maharashtra drought-free in five years, is helping bringing more lands under irrigation. Beed has since 2014 spent around Rs 150 crore on widening existing storages like streams and farm ponds and creating new ones to conserve water under the programme, which can be used to irrigate fields. The state government has in its latest Budget allocated Rs 1,200 crore to Jalyukt Shivar.“When Israel can manage with less than 450 mm rainfall, why can’t we manage with 650 mm? But without storage, the rains do not make a lot of difference to a farmer,” says Deelip Jadhav, an agri department official in Beed. Ram adds that 3-4 consecutive years of deficient rainfall happen rarely.“Drought in many ways is manmade; it is caused by mismanagement.” What is worrisome to the Beed administration about the cropping pattern now is the trebling of the area under sugarcane cultivation this year, thanks to the rains. Sugarcane is a remunerative but water-intensive crop that accounts for just 4% of the cultivable area in Marathwada; the low micro-irrigation coverage means the water used in sugarcane is better used elsewhere.A renovated cement nala bund in Tippatwadi village of Beed districtUnder surface irrigation, one hectare (2.47 acres) of sugarcane, with a duration of around 360 days, needs 2,200 mm of water, compared to 320 mm for soybean over a period of 85 days and 500 mm for jowar over 105 days. Pawar’s neighbour has already planted sugarcane and Pawar, who used to work as a sugarcane labourer in western Maharashtra, will do the same if this year’s rains are as good as last year’s. In western Maharashtra districts like Solapur and Ahmednagar sugarcane is a more popular crop.Pramod Aggarwal of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, or CGIAR, believes it is natural for a farmer to maximise his earnings. “He is not bothered about the groundwater levels going down. He has to think of his livelihood before community welfare.” Marathwada accounts for 49 of the 170 cooperative sugar mills in the state but some of them have been shut for the past couple of years owing to a shortage in supply of sugarcane.A 20-year-old cement nala bund in Tippatwadi which is being desiltedAccording to Skymet Weather Services, India will see a below-normal monsoon this year. Makarand Kulkarni, chief statistical officer at Skymet, believes the monsoon in Marathwada may not be as good as 2016 but not as bad as 2015 either.Pandurang Pole, district collector of Latur, says farmers in Latur are aware the rains this year may not necessarily be like last year’s, and the area set aside for sugarcane has halved from the average of the last five years. Having said that, a good monsoon may temporarily dissuade a farmer from embracing micro irrigation, as becomes evident while talking to Pawar.When asked why he has not bothered to get drip irrigation, despite the government’s push, Pawar says, “Earlier there was no point because there was no water, now there’s no need because there is enough water.” Drip irrigation could cost anywhere between Rs 30,000 and Rs 80,000 per hectare depending on the crop and the government subsidises up to 60%.Deelip Jadhav, Agri department official, BeedImproving the region’s water security could in the long run do its bit to stop farmers taking their lives. In 2015, 1,130 Marathwada farmers committed suicide. That was twice the figure in the previous year. The suicides dropped to 1,053 in 2016, a third of the state total. In the first two months of this year, over 130 Marathwada farmers have already reportedly taken the drastic step. Shivram Ghodke, an organic farmer, believes it is not just crop failure that plagues marginal farmers and farmhands but also indebtedness from having to support large families.“No government scheme will work unless we internalise individual farmers’ needs and benefits from the scheme,” says Aggarwal. Regardless of how good the rains are this year, a region like Marathwada, with its own challenges, will have to look beyond the immediate monsoons and adapt its farming practices to its climatic conditions and conserve as much water as possible for a not-so-rainy day.