Marathwada's eight drought-hit districts appear to be struggling to meet targets for Jalyukt Shivar Yojana, the state government's flagship scheme for water management.
As drought deepens its grip over India, its impact has thrown up stark images: people scrambling down steep wells to scrape water into buckets, trains being brought in to prevent water wars, crops laid to waste.
But was this scale of crisis inevitable or partly man-made?
After all, this is the third successive year of poor rain, so there was enough time for governments at the Centre and state to prepare for water scarcity.
Those guidelines for advance measures are clearly laid out in a hefty 200-page Manual on Drought Management, prepared in 2009, and available on the Agriculture Ministry website, which sets out in detail all that has to be done at various levels of the government to reduce the impact of poor rain.
It says for instance, that a National Crisis Management Committee (NCMC) under the Cabinet Secretary is the pre-eminent body for all calamities, including drought.
A Crisis Management Group (CMG) of the Agriculture Ministry is meant to function under the NCMC's watch.
It is unclear if either of these bodies took note of looming drought, and if so, what pre-emptive steps they took.
At the ground level, the manual says one of the first steps is to identify water sources and revive them -- before the monsoon starts.
The use of tankers is only when all options are exhausted; trains are meant as a last resort.
But as we found in Osmanabad district, in Maharashtra's Marathwada region, ground zero for drought, the evidence suggests otherwise.
In Yenagur village, they showed us a series of rusted-over handpumps, unused for the past six months - 25 in all - all of which have turned dry. No one from the government came to revive these, they said, nor to recharge wells, or water bodies.
Instead, they are sent one water tanker every 15 days, which barely meets their needs.
This is not an isolated instance.
Marathwada's eight drought-hit districts appear to be struggling to meet targets for Jalyukt Shivar Yojana, the state government's flagship scheme for water management.
Since December 2014 when the programme started, the eight districts have on an average achieved only 23 per cent of their targets.
Neighbouring Solapur, however, appears to be an exception providing evidence of how implementing the rule book can reduce the severity of the crisis.
In Malegaon village, we are shown how the simple act of recharging a well in April last year, before the monsoons, ensured water to the village without the need for a single tanker.
Tukaram Mundhe, Solapur's Collector said his team identified - and revived - close to 15,000 drinking water sources across the district well before disaster could strike.
On the Jalyukt Shivar Yojana website, Solapur has targeted 23,715 schemes, seven to eight times more than most neighbouring districts. Their completion rate is close to 50 per cent. (An update from the collector's office tells us that more than 30,000 schemes have been identified in Solapur and 93 per cent of these have been completed.)
Parinita Dandekar, Associate Coordinator with South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, told NDTV that the drinking water crisis Marathwada is facing now is not just because of a shortage of rain because of mismanagement of water resources.