[India’s small farmers,
once the country’s economic backbone and most reliable vote bank, are
increasingly being left behind. With global competition and rising costs
cutting into their lean profits, their ranks are dwindling, as is their
contribution to the gross domestic product. If rural voters once made their
plight into front-page news around election time, this year the large parties
are jockeying for the votes of the urban middle class, and the farmers’ voices
are all but silent.]
By Ellen Barry
 |
| Andrea Bruce for The New York Times |
BOLLIKUNTA,
India — Latha Reddy Musukula was making tea on a recent
morning when she spotted the money lenders walking down the dirt path toward
her house. They came in a phalanx of 15 men, by her estimate. She knew their
faces, because they had walked down the path before.
After each visit, her
husband, a farmer named Veera Reddy, sank deeper into silence, frozen by some
terror he would not explain. Three times he cut his wrists. He tied a noose to
a tree, relenting when the family surrounded him, weeping. In the end he waited
until Ms. Musukula stepped out, and then he hanged himself from a pipe
supporting their roof, leaving a careful list of each debt he owed to each
money lender. She learned the full sum then: 400,000 rupees, or $6,430.
A current of dread runs
through this farmland, where women in jewel-colored saris bend their backs over
watery terraces of rice. In Andhra Pradesh, the southern state where Ms.
Musukula lives, the suicide rate among farmers is nearly three times the
national average; since 1995, the number of suicides by India’s farmers has
passed 290,000, according to the national crime records bureau, though the
statistics do not specify the reason for the act.
India’s small farmers,
once the country’s economic backbone and most reliable vote bank, are
increasingly being left behind. With global competition and rising costs
cutting into their lean profits, their ranks are dwindling, as is their
contribution to the gross domestic product. If rural voters once made their
plight into front-page news around election time, this year the large parties
are jockeying for the votes of the urban middle class, and the farmers’ voices
are all but silent.
Even death is a stopgap
solution, when farmers like Mr. Reddy take their own lives, their debts pass
from husband to widow, from father to children. Ms. Musukula is now trying to
scrape a living from the four acres that defeated her husband. Around her she
sees a country transformed by economic growth, full of opportunities to break
out of poverty, if only her son or daughter could grasp one.
But the trap that
closed on her husband is tightening around her. Like nearly every one of her
neighbors, she is locked into a bond with village money lenders — an intimate
bond, and sometimes a menacing one. No sooner did they cut her husband’s body
down than one of them was in her house, threatening to block the cremation
unless she paid.
Her appeals to
officials for help have been met with indifference. Lately, her fear has been
getting the better of her.
“Sure, they will pay,
otherwise it would be as if someone has broken into our house and stolen our
money,” said Sudhakar Ravula, a slight man who lives in a village about two
miles away. He introduces himself as a fisherman, but, under questioning,
fishes out a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses and unfolds a promissory note
signed by Veera Reddy.
Four years ago, he
said, he used borrowed money to lend Mr. Reddy $800, at an annual interest rate
of 24 percent. Reminded of Mr. Reddy’s suicide, Mr. Ravula looked impatient. “I
always feel sad for the man,” he said, “but committing suicide is not the right
way to go about it.”
Stories of farmers
committing suicide may prompt shudders in gatherings of sociologists, but the
local officials have heard it all before. When market reforms were introduced
in 1991, the state scaled down subsidies and import barriers fell, thrusting
small farmers into an unforgiving global market. Farmers took on new risks,
switching to commercial crops and expensive, genetically modified seeds, paying
more to educate their children in the hopes they would land government jobs.
They found themselves
locked in a white-knuckle gamble, juggling ever-larger loans at exorbitant
interest rates, always hoping a bumper harvest would allow them to clear their
debts, so they could take out new ones. This pattern has left a trail of human
wreckage.
On a recent afternoon,
Ms. Musukula was one of 18 women waiting outside a pale-green government
building. Nearly every woman carried a police report, identifying debt as the
cause of a farmer’s suicide — a fact that should entitle them to a one-time
payment of 150,000 rupees, to be split between the money lenders and the
bereaved family, pledged by the state government around election time in 2004.
To receive it, they
needed a designation from the district revenue officer. They had come to see
one of the officer’s subordinates, a local revenue officer who might act as a
gatekeeper.
They crowded into the
back of his office and took a good look at him: P. Bhiksham, a middle-aged man
in rimless glasses, a green towel tucked behind his back to soak up sweat. Mr.
Bhiksham listened to two women recite the details of their husbands’ deaths,
and then began to speak. The real problem, he said, was that their husbands
drank too much.
“In India we have a lot
of problems, and we have to live with them,” he replied. “You have problems,
and you have to live with them. Drinking is a major problem for most of the
families. One has to learn to run the family with whatever resources one has.”
He went on to say that he had never in his career encountered a genuine case of
farmer suicide. “We all have freedom to choose our own livelihoods,” he said, primly,
“and the land here is fertile.”
The women listened
silently and filed out. They were disappointed by what Mr. Bhiksham had said,
but not surprised. Many local officials blame farmers for mismanaging their
finances.
“The family will always
tell you it’s a farmer suicide,” said G. Satyanarayana, the chief inspector at
the precinct that had registered Veera Reddy’s suicide in 2012. After glancing
through the case file, he said Mr. Reddy had been undone by “his bad habits,”
by which he meant drinking. The real problem, he said, was that local farmers
were overspending on their children’s education.
“Some of the farmers
are getting unreasonably aspirational,” he said. “These are small farmers from
villages, but they don’t send their kids to government schools, but to private
schools. They are going for false prestige, they don’t really take note of their
own financial status. The mother, instead of going out to the fields at 5 a.m.,
she is waiting for the school bus at 9 a.m.”
As for money lenders
harassing widows after a suicide, he said the police had never received any
reports of this happening, so were powerless to take any action. Probably, he
said, villagers do not go to police about money lenders because they are afraid
they will need a loan in the future.
“Nobody approaches the
police,” he said. “You always wish they would come and complain.”
Latha Musukula is
beginning to be undone by fear. On the morning when the money lenders had come
to her doorstep, she tried to do what her husband had always done — chitchat,
put them off for a month or two. But then one of the money lenders described the
house he planned to build on Ms. Musukula’s land, and addressed her as “whore.”
Ms. Musukula was so
thrown off balance that she repeated the words the money lender asked her to
say, promising to repay the whole amount by April. She had no idea how she was
going to do it.
Selling the farmland,
as Mr. Ravula is urging, would leave the family without a source of income, and
force her to return penniless to her brother’s household.
Because they cannot
repay their loans, Ms. Musukula said, only one family in the village is willing
to talk to them.
Fingers of fear climb
up her neck as she walks to her cornfields in the morning. The corn is
shriveling for lack of water, she can see that, and one of the farm’s two
generators was just disconnected for nonpayment. When she went to the doctor
the other day, she said, he “told me that my nerves may break soon.”
Something similar
happened in the months before her husband killed himself, when he suddenly
seemed frightened to leave the house. Always a drinker and an expansive host,
he seemed to retreat into himself.
“He told me, ‘I am
going to die, I don’t know how you are going to take care of the loans, because
I am going to die,’ ” she recalled. A week before he killed himself, he said,
“How will you manage things if I die? Will you cry a lot? You’ll be harassed by
everyone.”
We’ll scrape by, she
told him then. A couple of good harvests and we can pay them all off.
These days it is she
who disappears into silences, and her son and daughter who watch from a distance,
uncertain of the exact amount that the family owes. Ms. Musukula tries to
shield them from this information, telling them to focus on their studies, but
Srilekha is 18, and she knows.
“Mommy hopes to delay
the loans and repay what we make from the farm, but we suffer losses almost
every year,” she said. “My brother and I wish that the money lenders would wait
until we finish school and get a job, but it is not possible.”
She added: “The money
lenders will not stop. What has to happen, will happen.”
@ The New York Times
