Protests flare up often in India. Water and power short­ages are preva­lent in the coun­try, so peo­ple will take to the streets and block traf­fic to demand more from their government.

An arti­cle from the Los Ange­les Times pro­vides an eye­wit­ness view of one such protest. Reporter Mark Mag­nier was present at a protest that did bring out a gov­ern­ment official.

The rage surged through the crowd, mix­ing with the heat, the sweat and the frus­tra­tion to cre­ate a volatile stew, as sev­eral hun­dred locals incensed over power and water short­ages blocked the main Alwar Road here Wednesday.

Most res­i­dents said they hadn’t seen a lightbulb’s worth of energy come through their wires in the last 60 hours, and this after suf­fer­ing pro­tracted cuts for the last month. With no power to pump well water, some said they had to walk miles to find a hand pump. Oth­ers said they were pay­ing up to a third of their mea­ger incomes to price-gouging dri­vers of water trucks.

Local­ized erup­tions like this one, most unre­ported, occur hun­dreds of times each week across India, where this year the sit­u­a­tion has been made worse by unusu­ally light mon­soon rains. The states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar and Rajasthan are among the hardest-hit areas.

Experts say the short­ages could be the result of global warm­ing or nat­ural cycles. That hasn’t pro­vided much solace to farm­ers like these in eastern Rajasthan as they watch their crops die, their liveli­hoods wither, their chil­dren go thirsty.

Rajasthan, which abuts Pak­istan, is heav­ily depen­dent on hydro­elec­tric power, as are many other drought-hit states. With water lev­els down, tur­bines aren’t turn­ing, tax­ing India’s overex­tended infra­struc­ture and fray­ing tempers.

Block­ing road­ways is a time-worn way to draw a response from offi­cials, par­tic­u­larly for rural com­mu­ni­ties. A protest last year in Rajasthan over access to gov­ern­ment jobs shut down the national high­way for a month.

“No one ever lis­tens to us unless we block the road,” said Kis­han Saini, 27 and unem­ployed, one of the lead­ers of the 2 1/2 –hour protest here Wednes­day. “This is the worst short­age I’ve seen in my life­time. We’ll keep doing this for as long as it takes to get some action.”

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