(ANS – Ahmednagar) – For most people, dreams involve aspirations of wealth, success, freedom or luxury. But what of the hinterlands of Maharashtra, where for generations villagers wake up to a new day aspiring for the most basic singular to existence itself - water?

As the summer sun bakes the parched earth, Bhamabai, a 53-year-old who lives in a mountainous village in Ahmednagar, sets out on an odyssey now cruelly familiar to her weathered feet. She walks and walks to a solitary hand pump still clinging to muddy traces of life-giving water five kilometres downhill, across a landscape crusted with the despair of drought.