Having watched his father's funeral pyre burn by a river bank close to their farm last month, Indian sugarcane grower Dattatray Bagal and his brothers had to set aside grief to count the financial cost of the coronavirus's impact on their family.

They had hoped to buy a tractor for the small farm in western Maharashtra state, but the brothers spent all their savings on hospital treatment for their father and three other family members who survived.

Lockdowns imposed by authorities trying to contain the surge added to the pain, but at least the monsoon season, which began this month, is forecast to deliver normal rainfall.

Some farmers like Yogesh Patil from Sangli district of Maharashtra were hit so badly that they don't have money to buy seeds and fertilisers to plant summer-sown crops such as corn and soybean.

“I was expecting to earn more than 100,000 rupees from a one-acre plot of tomatoes. But prices crashed because of the lockdown and I couldn't recover the production cost,” Patil told Reuters.

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