DAHEGAON (India): In the searing summer heat of India’s vast western plateau, Pramod Khandale’s lifeless body hung from a tree for four days, bloated and rotting, before his neighbours spotted it.
Only days before, the young farmer was planning to sow cotton, buy a new bicycle and take a wife.
“We thought he had gone to a nearby village. Suicide, we never imagined,” Yeshwant, Khandale’s elder brother, told Reuters, in this grimy village of tiled huts and fenced courtyards in India’s wealthiest state of Maharashtra.
Government officials visited Khandale’s home, trying to find out if he was eligible for compensation for farmers committing suicide because of failed crops or poor prices and debts.
Khandale, 25, was not. He had borrowed from a village moneylender to pay for cotton seeds but there was no proof of the deal.
Across India’s sprawling western and southern plateau, where the black soil has long borne a rich harvest of cotton, Khandale’s story echoes in thousands of farming families — impoverished peasants killing themselves by the thousands, unable to repay loans taken for their crops.
India’s stunning economic growth of about 8 per cent in the past three years has made millions in the cities rich, but it has bypassed the low-tech agriculture sector that supports more than 60 per cent of its one billion-plus people.
About 800 km west of Dahegaon is Mumbai — Maharashtra’s capital and India’s richest city — where millions crowd shopping malls and families spend as much on vacations abroad as Khandale family’s spends on upkeep for a year.
India’s farming minister, Sharad Pawar, said last month that 3,607 farmers killed themselves in just four states over the past five years, but activists and farmers’ groups say the figure is at least five times higher.
Most of the suicides are reported from the three southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka — where the urban economy is booming — as well as the prosperous western state of Maharashtra.
Despite supporting some 600 million people directly or indirectly, agriculture contributes only a fifth of India’s GDP and gets only 12 per cent of the country’s banking credit.
Many farmers borrow — often amounts that would only buy a few drinks in a chic London or New York pub — from the village moneylender at rates as high as 10 per cent a month, and their debts soar when crops fail or prices tumble.
Officials say many farmers have only themselves to blame, borrowing unwisely to fund lavish spending or to pay for weddings. But analysts say the government should be doing more to provide credit at cheaper rates.
Bad weather in recent years has compounded the problems.
“The lack of cheap bank credit and water to their fields over a decade had driven them to suicide,” admits Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.
Economic liberalisation since 1991 has not helped either, with duties being gradually phased out and farmers facing tough competition from heavily subsidised European or American cotton.
In the past the Indian government used to buy all domestic cotton at a prefixed price. That safety net was removed in 2005, leaving farmers at the mercy of middlemen who often browbeat them into unprofitable sales. “Suicides are driven by many factors, including debt from private moneylenders, high input costs and low output prices,” said M.S. Swaminathan, noted agricultural scientist and chief of India’s National Commission on Farmers.
Authorities have announced millions of dollars in relief — one-time handouts, subsidised lending and even a two-year moratorium on payment of interest on agriculture loans. But many eligible farmers have yet to receive any money.
Some have been paid but say the aid was not enough to cover their old debt, while others, like Khandale’s family, are not eligible for compensation because they borrowed from private lenders without any proof of transaction.
In February, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched an ambitious bid to tackle poverty by seeking to guarantee a hundred days of paid employment each year to rural families left behind by a city-based economic boom.
But the scheme is making slow progress through India’s massive bureaucratic red tape.
“I do recognise that we need to do a lot more to bring prosperity to our rural areas,” Singh said in a recent speech to mark his government’s second year in power.
“We will work on all fronts to ensure that our farmers share in the nation’s prosperity.”
In the meantime, lobbyists say the number of farmer deaths is on the increase.
Frustrated at their lot, farmers in Maharashtra’s Dorli village have put their entire settlement of about 45 households, complete with a handpump and wells, on sale for 200 million rupees ($4.4 million).
“We will take that money, divide it and go to the city to find work. There is nothing left to do in the village,” said Balbir Digambarrao Omkar, a Dorli cotton farmer.—Reuters
