Scorched Life

Pramod Rameshrao Bhoir, 29, would have been a groom in a few days. But that amavasya, all hope was extinguished and only darkness remained. A small farmer who owned a four-acre plot of agricultural land, Rameshrao ended his life on 18 April, ahead of his wedding— scheduled for 27 April. It was his mother, 59-year-old widow Babytai, who found him frothing at the mouth in the early hours of the morning. Fearing a snakebite, the family rushed him to a nearby hospital only to be told that he had consumed poison. Rameshrao was pronounced dead on arrival.

Rameshrao’s house in Sevagram village, about 500 metres from Mahatama Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram, in Wardha district wears a desolate look. His sisters, Vaishali Rajendra Zhade and Aruna Jagdish Mankar, who had married men of villages far away, are in a state of shock. For years, they had been hearing stories of farmers who had ended their lives in distress. But never did they imagine this bitter reality would come knocking on their door. “My son talked to everyone, although he did not have close friends,” says a teary-eyed Babytai. “He would go to the fields at 8 am and return by 8 pm. Once he came home, he would clean himself, eat his dinner and watch TV. He was crazy about films and entertainment programmes. Sometimes, he would sit outside and chat with his friends.”

Death brought with it the revelation that Rameshrao had been weighed down by debt. Unknown to his family, he had racked up loans of nearly Rs 1.4 lakh. “He never said a word about being in debt. Others have told us now. No bank or sahukar (moneylender) has approached us yet, so we do not know whether there is more money to be repaid,” says Babytai.

According to his sister Aruna, Rameshrao had visited her a month ago and seemed tense when he spoke about farming and the yield from his holdings. “He told me he would need to take a loan to get married and he was not sure how he would repay it,” says Aruna.

Vidarbha is a region of assured rainfall. However, the past decades have been harsh on farmers here and Rameshrao was no exception. He quit school in Class 8 to be a farmer after his father, an activist of the Shetkari Sanghatana, died in an accident. Rameshrao, ‘Bapu’ to his near and dear, had dreamed of becoming an IAS officer. He was a confident youth, says Sudhakar Patil, ex-sarpanch of Sevagram and his cousin. As a reluctant farmer, he would soon encounter the vagaries of nature. Unlike the irrigated farming of the rich districts of western Maharashtra, Vidarbha’s small and medium farmers look up to nature for their livelihood. Of late, all they have got is abject poverty. The state’s irrigation projects here are yet to take off and the ones that are in operation supply water to rich farmers with large holdings and political connections.

Rameshrao irrigated his four-acre holding with water drawn from a well by a motor. As the monsoons receded, the water level in the well, too, went down. With the long power cuts during the day, the fields could not be properly irrigated. “Like all of us, he often went to the field to turn on the motor at night and waited for four-five hours until the water reached every part of the field. In the morning, he was back at the field again. This is the life of a farmer here,” says Patil.

For the past five years, the yield from his fields had been very low, not even enough to cover the costs for the next cropping season. Heavy and untimely rain, hailstorm, drought— Rameshrao had seen it all. Like most Vidarbha farmers, he, too, planted cotton, tur dal and soy bean. This year, he spent nearly Rs 1 lakh on farming but the yield did not live up to his expectations. One and a half quintal of cotton and a quintal of tur dal is all he got for his efforts. The state government’s procurement prices for cotton and tur dal this year were between Rs 2,800 and Rs 3,000 and Rs 4,800 and Rs 5,000 per quintal, respectively. Add it up and that is the total sum Rameshrao got from his crop this year. And this is not net of what he must have paid his farm hands—Rs 150 each for 20 kg of harvest. It was the same story last year.

As his debt soared, so did the pressure to get married. He had been putting it off for a better yield. In 2014, the woman he had been engaged to ran away with another. But that wasn’t the last straw, says his mother. Being heavily indebted to banks and local lenders, he was unable to take any more loans for his wedding this year, and perhaps this drove him to his death, she says. The suit stitched for his wedding reception hangs unworn in a closet even as Rameshrao’s body is draped in other new clothes he would have worn at his wedding. The wedding invitations are being burnt along with his body.

Thirty-five km away, in Gaul village, is the home of Prakash Ramdasji Namdar, 26. A poor farmer with a three- acre land holding, Prakash, like Rameshrao, drank pesticide and killed himself on 22 April. He had lived with his 63-year- old mother Kusum in a dilapidated brick structure with a tin roof inside a narrow by-lane. People throng his low-roofed house for a shanty ritual days after his death. The women, seated on the floor, chop spinach and vegetables. The men talk animatedly among themselves. Prakash’s mother sits far away, staring into the distance. “What do I do? What can I do? I am an old woman,” she says. Prakash had run up debts of Rs 45,000 to buy seeds and hire bullocks—he might have taken other undisclosed loans—and his near-barren land is not exactly an asset for Kusum. Since her three daughters cannot support their mother, her only option is to work as a farm hand. “This is a village of poor people, who will feed me here?” asks Kusum, her eyes brimming with tears.

In the suicide-hit villages of Wardha, Yavatmal and Chandrapur, ask anyone about the deaths and they tell you the same story. There are no two versions. It is as if the village is rallying together to ensure that the family gets its compensation from the state government. To be eligible for the Rs 2 lakh compensation package, the farmland should have been in the name of the deceased, and there should have been an unpaid loan on the land. According to a government source, every official in the suicide-prone districts is busy monitoring the issue. “Every suicide is creating a political storm. In some cases, we hand out the compensation on compassionate grounds though the deceased do not fit the state’s eligibility criteria, to avoid a political backlash. Many suicides happen right after or before a marriage in the family,” says the source.

Weddings are a lavish affair and farmers borrow heavily from private moneylenders, often mortgaging their land to them, at usurious rates of interest. In addition to the repayment, the farmer also has to give away a part of his crop yield to the lender. The produce thus collected is sold back to the farmer when he runs out of foodgrains at home.

With farmers trying to squeeze a higher yield out of their land, reliance on BT seeds is very high in Vidarbha. Available at the government-certified Krishi Kendras located at tehsil centres, farmers often take these seeds on credit. Corruption is rampant at the Kendras. “They charge about 15-20 per cent interest from the farmer which is pocketed by the people who operate these Kendras. There will be no official entry for this credit transaction,” says a source from the Wardha district collector’s office.

Vijay Jawandhia, a Shetkari Sanghatana leader who began farming in the early 70s, says the problem worsens with each crop season. “The compensation is too little for a farmer caught in a debt trap. The huge divide between India and Bharat, where farmers live, sees the exploitation of farmers,” says Jawandhia.

The social fallout of these mounting debts is that girls don’t want to marry farmers or their sons, and the younger lot are keeping away from this accursed profession. “Late marriages have become common, and falling fertility rates are a big worry. A farmer will sell his land to make his son a peon with a government job, but will not ask him to till the family land,” says Jawandhia.

Visit any village in Marathwada, where the acreage under drought is higher than that in Vidarbha, and you will find youth playing teen patti or sitting around chatting while their elderly parents work in the fields. “The youth are dropping out of school because of financial problems. They do not want to farm and are angry about their poverty. Migration to cities is very high and they work as loaders, construction labourers and security guards—as anything but farmers,” says Amit Gore, whose NGO Malhar organises street plays and theatre performances in drought-hit villages.

In the past five years, there has been a preference for the police and Army, says Purushottam Chaudhary, a former policeman who has worked in the Naxal-hit districts of Maharashtra and now conducts physical training classes for village youth. A black belt in judo, Chaudhary has trained many young men—at no cost—to join the armed forces. “The numbers of those who attend the recruitment drives of both forces have increased manifold over the years,” he says.

The Rajiv Gandhi Health Scheme, under which major ailments are treated at private hospitals at no cost, has seen a sharp rise in cancer, diabetes and heart disease among farmers and their families, says a government source. Paediatric ailments and depression, too, are on the rise in Vidarbha. “Every farmer chews tobacco or khira (a strong beaten mixture of tobacco, kaath and chuna which is more potent than gutkha, now banned in Maharashtra) to endure longer work hours in the fields. Mounting health problems coupled with debt are a major cause for suicides,” says a source.

According to Jawandhia, the cropping pattern in the Vidarbha belt has changed drastically. Jowar or sorghum, which was a farm staple and made up 40 per cent of all cultivation in Vidarbha, has now gone off the farms entirely. It has been replaced by soy bean, which is exported as cattlefeed. Despite the lack of good yields, small and medium farmers continue to cultivate the soy bean crop, which is also being promoted by the state government. “No one eats jowar bhakri or hurda (tender roasted jowar still in its green form, a culinary delicacy) anymore,” says Jawandhia.

Vidarbha has bigger worries—among them the steadily declining acreage under cultivation, as farmers migrate to cities, and the poor carbon content in the soil as a result of heavy use of chemicals. Perhaps this is the death knell for farming in the region.

debtdiseasedroughtfarmers suicideMaharashtrapovertyVidarbha