Showrooms of expensive cars, ornate banquet houses and glitzy malls line the GT road leading to Jalandhar. These signs of ostentation, brought back by Punjab’s diaspora, begin a good 15 km before the main city. But a five-km detour from the main road takes you away from it and towards the village of Jandusingha. The village, say locals, got its name from a criminal who was reformed by one of the Sikh Gurus who blessed the village.

But today, as the 15,000 residents of this village wait desperately for the rains, it feels anything but blessed. In the last fortnight, the village has witnessed an unusually large number of skirmishes. The cause is almost always the same. Delayed monsoons have increased the farmers’ dependence on irrigation through tubewells. But erratic power supplies (five hours at best and two hours a day at worst) coupled with low voltage means that tubewells can’t always run in two contiguous fields. Neighbouring farmers often accuse each other of damaging electricity wires or stealthily switching off tubewells.

Jaswinder Sangha has been living in Jandusingha for the last 45 years. “Rains have been delayed in the past too but things have never been so bad,” he says. Sangha, the most prosperous man in the village, gets a steady stream of visitors through the day. They know Sangha has a computer with an Internet connection and request him to check weather updates. Checking his sleek Blackberry, he tells everyone the rains are expected tomorrow. “It is an assurance more than anything else. Maybe it is wishful thinking,” he says.

... contd.