Slash and Burn

Chandrabhan Gurnule’s house in Saikheda village, 20 km off the Panderkauda town in Vidarbha district, is easy to identify. The locals call it the "suicide house". When we went there, Gurnule’s 13th-day funeral ceremony was under way. Like hundreds of others in the district, the 35-year-old farmer had committed suicide by consuming pesticide on April 2. Three days before killing himself, he had repaid Rs 25,000 of his Rs 1.05 lakh bank loan. He had given everything he earned from a partially ruined cotton crop to do that – thinking that under the central government’s new package, his 9 percent loan would be substituted for a 7 percent one.

That didn’t happen. The bank declared him a defaulter due to the Rs 80,000 unpaid amount and refused to lower his interest rate. Gurnule had no option but to borrow another Rs 1.50 lakh from the village moneylender. "He always worried about how he would raise money to sow the next season and how he would repay his loans," says his widow, Rekha, who has an eight-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter. The worry and the dismay led Gurnule to take his life.

His death, like hundreds of others, was assiduously tabulated by Kishore Tiwari, who runs the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, and has taken on the onerous task of recording these tragic stories in spreadsheets in three languages—Hindi, Marathi and English. In Vidarbha, as soon as a farmer commits suicide, someone from the village informs Tiwari, whose dark list grows by two or three daily.

Across Vidarbha in eastern Maharashtra and the Telangana and Rayalaseema regions of Andhra Pradesh, thousands have chosen death to escape their worries about repayment of huge loans, unremunerative farm output, and natural calamities that hit their crops. Over 450 cotton farmers have committed suicide this season in Vidarbha, and over 1,250 have died in Telangana and Rayalaseema in the past 24 months. The deaths continue unabated despite new policies initiated by the two states and the central governments. It becomes depressing when one considers that the UPA government rode to power in May 2004 on the promise of improving the lives of the rural poor.

The various governments claim to have done more than enough to stop the suicides. N. Raghuveera Reddy, the Andhra Pradesh agriculture minister, says he has accepted 170 of the 174 recommendations made by the Jayati Ghosh Commission. He adds that the Centre, too, is planning a special package for the farmers in 34 districts in four states, including 15 in Andhra Pradesh. Even the Maharashtra government claims to have implemented two relief packages in the affected areas.

Obviously, mere policies haven’t been able to put money or food in the hands of the Indian farmers. What is required is to understand the underlying reasons for the deaths. On April 13, 2006, 45-year-old Lingareddy from AP’s Medak district consumed pesticide and died. He had taken four acres of land on a lease at Rs 20,000 a year, and his debt, including borrowings for agricultural inputs, mounted to Rs 4 lakh in the past three years. But he was unable to service the debt, or earn enough money, as his crop was invariably under-irrigated. A combination of power shortages and low voltage ensured this. The advice by state officials to grow onions and brinjal failed. Lingareddy had no other alternative. Sampad from Arepally village, Karimnagar, killed himself when the cotton crop on his 2-acre land failed due to lack of water. His debt: Rs 1.5 lakh.

So, in Andhra Pradesh, the problems for farmers become acute because of power and water shortage.A farmer spends an average of Rs 3,000 a month only to fix his waterpump, which breaks down regularly due to voltage fluctuations, adding to his cost as well as reducing his potential profits. Look at what happened to Gunreddy Johnreddy of Nalgonda district, who killed himself on March 19. On his three-acre land, he sunk three borewells which dried up. His motor had to be repaired four times during the season and, just when the paddy crop was ripe for harvesting, it was stolen. So, the answer lies in improving irrigation, rather than focusing on credit.

Obviously, reducing the farmers’ debt burden, or easing it, is also crucial. But the states and central governments’ response to increase credit flows to the agricultural sector and reduce interest rates on farm loans has had minimal impact. As is the case with two-thirds of Vidarbha’s farmers, most of them are ineligible for fresh bank loans as they are treated as defaulters due to their inability to repay the earlier loans. Like Gurnule, they have no option but to borrow from local moneylenders and traders at higher rates. The result: sure-shot suicides.

Worse, the Maharashtra government’s relief packages state that fresh bank borrowings can’t be used to repay moneylenders, making life tougher for the farmers. "Next season could be worse as farmers already can’t get loans from banks and now moneylenders too are reluctant to lend. Come next season, how will the farmers sow their crops?" asks a Vidarbha activist. Vijay Jawandhia of the Shetkari Sangathna says the state should take steps so that the farmers have no need for the local moneylenders. That’s one reason why two relief packages have failed, and Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is talking of a third one for the coming season. "The most important thing is that farmers need to be brought back into the legal credit system," feels N.D. Patil of the Peasants and Workers Party in Maharashtra.

To stem the crisis, the government also needs to look at how Maharashtra’s cotton procurement scheme has wreaked havoc among the farmers. The Maharashtra monopoly cotton procurement scheme was set up in 1972 to purchase cotton from the state’s 30 lakh cotton farmers. The scheme floundered with successive governments hiking procurement prices to woo farmers, even as global prices crashed. It led to a supply glut and a loss to the state’s exchequer. Between 1994 and 2004, the scheme’s loss mounted from Rs 172 crore to several thousand crores. This season, the Maharashtra state purchased a mere 14 lakh quintals of cotton, compared to 242 lakh quintals last year; it paid Rs 1,700-1,900 per quintal this year against Rs 2,250-2,500 last year, despite a rise in input costs. As the procurement federation delayed payments—thrice a year against the earlier norm of paying within 24 hours—the farmers were forced to rely more on moneylenders.

Sliding global prices coupled with a low 10 per cent duty, also made imports cheaper; imported cotton now sells at Rs 17,000 a bale compared to Rs 19,000 for Indian cotton. The result: more cotton was imported in the past five years than in the previous two decades. But the central government didn’t feel the need to make cash payments to the farmers, as happens in many developed nations, or increase import duties to shelter cotton farmers from the volatility of global markets.

Instead, the relief packages talk about starting counselling camps for the farmers, asking them to join Art of Living classes, or attend morning bhajans.For the families of the dead farmers, the politicians promise the moon—like a lucrative compensation package or a promise to get the daughters married. Nothing like that happens. Jyothi, whose 28-year-old husband died last November, is still waiting for a compensation. Being the sole bread-winner, she’s struggling to feed her four children and two aging in-laws. The plight of Koyyada Komuramma, 50, is worse. Her husband died in June 2004, she suffers from blood pressure and diabetes, and she’s still waiting for the government’s money. "I beg at the houses of richer families who are kind enough to give me some rice," she wails, holding her dead husband’s photograph. Even the state government agrees that less than 40 per cent of the dead farmers’ families have received compensation.

One can always argue that farmers can move out of farming and get into other sectors. But the socio-economic realities prevent them from doing so. Ajay Dandekar, a professor of development studies who co-wrote a report on the causes of farmers’ suicides, says that "the lack of alternative employment sources makes it harder for the farmers." Those who thought of selling their land find that it’s not profitable. Sampad’s wife Saramma says that her husband thought of the option, but found that it would fetch him Rs 50,000 per acre. "The amount we would have got would have been enough only to repay the debts," she adds as her three children look on, dazed and hungry.