[Since late February, 156 farmers in the state have
committed suicide, according to Kishor Tiwari, president of the Vidarbha Jan
Aandolan Samiti, a farmer activist group. Compared with the state’s population
of 112 million, the number of farmer suicides is a statistical blip, but the
issue of farmer suicides is an emotional one in a country where 70 percent of
the population depends on agriculture as a livelihood and where farmers are far more likely to kill themselves compared with the rest of the
population.]
By Neha Thirani
Bagri
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Neha Thirani Bagri
Chandra Shekhar Mahajan, left, Pramod Bhagwant Mahajan, center, and Renutai Bhagwant
Mahajan are the family of Bhagwanta Haribhar Mahajan, a farmer who committed suicide in
Dhanora village in the Vidarbha region of
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DHANORA, India Maharashtra ,
about 50 miles south of Nagpur
In all, 28
districts of Maharashtra have seen crop devastation this winter, adding to the
misery of farmers who were already struggling to cope with the impact of severe
droughts in 2011 and 2012. Vinayak Deshmukh, technical officer to the state’s
commissioner of agriculture, said about two million hectares of farmland in Maharashtra
were affected, and local news reports estimated
the damage to state crops amounted to about 50 billion rupees, or $829 million.
For
Bhagwanta Haribhar Mahajan, a 60-year-old farmer from Dhanora in the Vidarbha
region who was already $7,500 in debt after his wife’s mouth cancer treatments
and previous loans, seeing 80 percent of his soybean crops destroyed was too
much to bear. He was already having trouble paying his debt, which was
equivalent to three years of income.
When Mr. Mahajan failed to
return home from the fields late last month, his son, Pramod Bhagwant Mahajan,
set out with a flashlight and neighbors to search for him. They were
nearly giving up hope when they spotted a towel and pair of slippers set neatly
by a well in a field. A short while later, his father’s body emerged from the
well, his legs bound together with rope.
“I never
thought he would take this step,” said Mr. Mahajan, 29, a tall, stocky man with
a look of steely determination in his eyes. “Perhaps if this year our crop
hadn’t been ruined, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
Since late
February, 156 farmers in the state have committed suicide, according to Kishor
Tiwari, president of the Vidarbha Jan Aandolan Samiti, a farmer activist group.
Compared with the state’s population of 112 million, the number of farmer suicides
is a statistical blip, but the issue of farmer suicides is an emotional one in
a country where 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture as a
livelihood and where farmers are far more likely to kill themselves compared with the rest of the
population.
In an
election year, each farmer’s death takes on an outsize importance. In the past,
Maharashtra ’s small farmers have reliably voted for the Indian
National Congress in the state, where it has a governing alliance with the
Nationalist Congress Party, and in national elections, helping it retain
control of New Delhi
On the same
day the elder Mr. Mahajan committed suicide, Narendra Modi, the opposition
party’s candidate for prime minister, criticized the government’s agrarian
policies at a gathering of farmers in the Vidarbha region.
Meanwhile,
some farmers in the Vidarbha region are threatening to exercise the “none of
the above” option on the ballot, which is being offered for the first time in
the national elections. Most areas in Vidarbha will vote Thursday in the first
of the three-phase elections in Maharashtra .
Ramdas
Jagganath Kaye, 74, a farmer in Dhanora, said all of the villagers were
resolved to pick none of the candidates on the ballot. “None of these
politicians are capable of running the government,” he said.
Across the
region, farmers expressed frustration with the false promises made by
politicians courting their vote. “These politicians, no matter what party, are
only seen in this region when the time comes to vote,” said Sudhir Chaple, 42,
a farmer in Dhanora whose crop was damaged by the rain and hailstorm.
“Otherwise, it’s been five years we haven’t seen their faces around here. They
say, ‘We will do this, we will change that,’ but then years pass by and
everything remains the same.”
The ruined
crops could also contribute to higher food prices, which was one of the chief
reasons for the Congress party’s defeat in state assembly elections last year.
Mr. Deshmukh, the technical officer to the commissioner of agriculture, said
that state residents were likely to pay more for grapes, pomegranates, mangoes,
legumes, sorghum and wheat and that nationally there would be a price
increase in sorghum and legumes because of the shortage.
On March 20, a meeting of ministers of the central
government decided that the National Disaster Response Fund would provide
$143,000 to Maharashtra for damage to crops from the rains and hailstorm,
according to reports from The
Press Trust of India. The agriculture ministry did not respond to repeated
requests for comment.
Mr.
Deshmukh said that the state had decided on a relief program that would provide
assistance only to farmers who had suffered over 50 percent crop damage. He
said the government would pay a one-time monetary compensation of $416 per
hectare for land under horticulture, $250 per hectare for irrigated land and
$166 per hectare for nonirrigated but cultivated land used for field crops. The
state would waive the interest on crop loans worth a total of $44.45 million
and clear electricity bills worth $33.17 million.
The
distribution of aid was delayed because the state government had to seek
special permission from the Election Commission to avoid the appearance of
bribery in the period before the elections. However, activists in the Vidarbha
region said that the money allotted to farmers rarely reached them and that
when it did, it was often insufficient to cover the cost of seeds and
fertilizers used on the land.
Any aid,
however, would come too late for Mr. Mahajan’s family. Renutai Bhagwant
Mahajan, 50, the wife of the dead farmer, still needs to visit doctors after
having surgery while she struggles to make ends meet and wonders how the family
will repay their debt to private moneylenders.
“All our
money went into the operation, but I am still sick and he is gone now,” said
Ms. Mahajan, 50, with a slight grimace on her face.
A tall,
strapping man, the elder
Mr. Mahajan was friendly and well liked by his neighbors, but as his worries
gnawed at him, he lost weight and became withdrawn, his family said.
“My father
had enjoyed a lot of success in his life,” said the younger Mr. Mahajan. “He
had been able to buy two tractors and send two of his three children to
college. But now everyone’s fields are ruined, and there isn’t much work for
the tractors.”
