At 5 pm on Friday, Jamdar Pada in Gorai, located about 20 kilometres from Mumbai, was wrapped in a spirit of festivity. With a dhol-tasha troupe in tow, its 250 residents had assembled on a ground that otherwise hosts religious festivals. Soon, former local Congress corporator Shivanand Shetty signalled the villagers, and the band dropped a beat, to which middle-aged tribal women began their folk dance. All of this was to celebrate the hamlet getting access to electricity after spending generations in darkness.

The merriment continued for the next half an hour. Sushma Dawade, a social worker, was seen getting teary-eyed as she put a garland around an electricity meter set up by employees of Adani Electricity. "For the past two years, I have been fighting to get a power connection in this village. There is no minister in the state I haven't met during this period; everyone made tall promises. But we continued to run from pillar to post [to get this done]," she said.