For the past eight years, millions of Indians have weathered the increasingly hot summer nights with a heavy dose of cricket entertainment. The 50-day long Indian Premier League begins this Saturday, and while it's always been a tournament of excesses, it faces a particularly troubling moral dilemma this year.

Nineteen matches are scheduled to be held in Maharashtra and it takes massive amounts of water to keep the grounds at Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur green. But the state is experiencing one of the worst droughts in memory. Already, villagers are moving to cities, which have better water supply systems, and cattle are being shifted to government camps to be fed and watered.

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The sad irony of the situation was not lost on judges of the Bombay High Court. On Wednesday, the court pulled up the Mumbai and Maharashtra cricket associations for the water they plan to use to prepare pitches for the upcoming IPL, describing it a “criminal wastage” at a time when the state was plagued by severe drought.

The court was hearing a Public Interest Litigation filed by the Mumbai NGO Loksatta Movement, which asked for the IPL matches in the state to be relocated.

The petitioners claim an estimated 60 lakh litres of water would be used for the 19 matches scheduled to be played in the state. But the Mumbai cricket body admitted to the court that 40 lakh litres would be needed just for the Mumbai matches.

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"How can you waste water like this?" the bench had told the advocate representing the Maharashtra Cricket Association. "Are people more important or IPL? How can you be so careless? This is criminal wastage. You know the situation in Maharashtra." The court will continue to hear the case in the coming days.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India has stated the matches will go ahead as scheduled, while saying its "sentiments are with drought-affected Marathwada".

But editorial cartoonists have pulled no punches on the incident. Here's a selection: