Tenant not paying rent or bills what can be done

Hello Kindly reply to my queries below. We have taken a house for rent in Coimbatore. The building has 2 portions in the ground floor and 4 portions in the first floor. 1 portion is occupied by the owner and the remaining 5 were rented out by the owner & are occupied by different tenants (we are the tenants only for 1 portion out of the 6). The portion that we took for rent doesnot have a separate electricity meter but the connection was fixed initially itself from the owners electricity connection. But all the other 5 portions have separate meters. We went out of station for more than 9 months and thus we didnot use the electricity or water. But we paid the full rent every month. Now my question is 1) Is it legally correct for the owner to ask us to pay for the electricity and water for the 9 months in which we did not occupy the house? Because we have no separate meter Infact the owner didnot even have to spend a single penny for water or electricity