The road to Powerguda, a poor tribal village in the -Adilabad district in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, is not for the faint of heart. It is a -seven-hour drive from Hyderabad, the nearest city with an airport, on a dusty two-lane highway so narrow that cars, trucks, buses and tractors hauling crops barely avoid collision as they hurtle along.

The occasional road signs, written in the curvy script of Telugu, the regional language, are incomprehensible even to most Indians and there are few maps. In one town on the way, several people were killed a few years ago in a clash with Naxalites, the Maoist rebels plaguing poor rural India. In Powerguda, a mosquito-borne disease has recently killed three people