Women of the Konda Dora tribe who live among Z. Jogampeta’s 64 families under Cheemalapadu panchayat in Ravikamatham mandal are facing a severe drinking water crisis following power outages over the past two days.
With no electricity, the village water tank became non-functional, leaving residents without potable water. Forced to abandon daily work, villagers trekked to natural springs in Peddagadda or the distant Kalyanalova reservoir to fetch water, enduring hardship during peak summer.
Peak summer is the cruellest time for a water crisis and these women whose daily work, whose income, whose children’s needs do not pause for a government that has failed them, are walking kilometres to springs and a distant reservoir, carrying water on their heads, so that their families can drink.
This is not a story from 1980. This is Andhra Pradesh in May 2026, under the government of N. Chandrababu Naidu the Chief Minister who calls himself a visionary, who travels to Singapore on ₹95 lakh trips, who is building an Assembly complex at ₹17,356 per square foot, and who borrows ₹523 crore every single day while in Z. Jogampeta, the women of the Konda Dora tribe cannot get drinking water because of the power outage.
The Infrastructure That Was Never Maintained
The crisis has worsened due to non-functional borewells. Both borewells in the village are defunct, leaving the community dependent on streams and springs during power cuts. Villagers said the problem recurs frequently during the rainy season as well, when electricity disruptions halt water supply. Borewells do not become defunct overnight. They deteriorate over months and years of neglect of missed maintenance schedules, of repair requests ignored, of officials who never stopped.
This is not a crisis that arrived without warning. It is a recurring emergency one that has happened before, will happen again, and has apparently never been considered urgent enough to warrant a permanent solution.
A government is not measured by the height of its Assembly building’s spire. It is measured by whether its most marginalised citizens the tribal woman in the hill village, the farmer at the auction centre, the patient whose hospital hasn’t been paid, can access the basic things that make a dignified human life possible.
Water, Power and broken borewells. The knowledge that when something breaks, someone in the government will fix it not because a newspaper reported it, not because women protested in the street, but because that is what governments exist to do. That invisibility is not an accident. It is a choice, and one for which this government must be held to account.
