India, Aug. 2 -- The dreaded El Nino factor has been hard on Maharashtra this monsoon. As many as 618 villages and 1,651 hamlets in 17 districts of the state are facing a shortage of drinking water, forcing the government to provide this through 758 tankers. During the same period last year, only 39 tankers were running.

The sparse rain has also affected the water level in dams across the state. Maharashtra has 3,029 small, medium and big dams with a total storage capacity of 40,786 million cubic metres. The total stock in these dams on August 1, the halfway mark of the monsoon, was 27,240 million cubic metres or 66.79% of their total capacity. Last year during the same period, it was 70.92%.

According to the August 1 water storage repo...