Kanadi, Beed, Marathwada

Drinking water still comes in water tankers from afar in Beed's Kanadi village. But Shankar Raut is hoping they could be the last of the tankers this summer. He's standing in a knee-high field full of a month-old shiny green hybrid jowar. "Last year at this time we'd barely planted the seeds. In a few months they dried up under the sun," he says. Raut, his father Dnyanoba and brother Balasaheb work on their 16-acre farm in one of India's most drought-prone regions. With the rain having tricked them last year, they're saddled with loans of over Rs 50,000 that have kept the home fires burning.

Now they're scampering around a full, green farm. They're dreaming of bidding goodbye to loans, eating well, keeping their children at the tuition class from where they often get sent back because the fee hasn't been paid.

Raut's cousin, Babasaheb, had to cancel his daughter's wedding last year because his farm had yielded no money. He took a Rs 50,000 loan to get her married a few months ago, bravely hoping this year's monsoon would bring a better harvest. Kundalik and his sons took loans of Rs 80,000. They have been able to pay back only Rs 30,000. But now their fields look like they'll knock off the loans.

In neighbouring Sakud village, Sopanrao Vede's wife decided to take matters in her own hands after two years of poor monsoon. She walked to the temple town of Pandharpur to pray for rain. By the time she came back, it had rained, Sopanrao had planted seeds and now stands in a field of fresh crop. Vede's two sons had been working at a brick kiln to support the family but this year one will work at the farm and the other has got a job as a supervisor in a clinic in Jalna. The rain's transformed Marathwada's famously brown and parched landscape to shiny green. Buffaloes wallow in ponds, peacocks strut, farmers soap up behind their ears.

But the people need the rain to be more than a fleeting surprise guest. They need it to stay for a few months. They need it to be more uniformly spread out, so some of their neighbours who haven't even sown seeds yet can catch up with them. They need the rains not just to water their fields but also to fill up their wells, rivers and dams so that the water tankers can go back. The good news is it is still raining.