For farmers in Vidarbha, state’s golden jubliee brings only sorrow

For farmers in Vidarbha, state’s golden jubliee brings only sorrow

Jaideep Hardikar / DNA

Monday, May 3, 2010 3:32

Ratan Ramchandra Raut had the next year’s worries on his mind when he chose to leave this world.

“Please take a note, all of you,” he wrote on a Rs100 stamp paper addressing his village sarpanch, talathi, tehsildar, MLA, MP, district collector, guardian minister, the chief minister and his deputy, the prime minister Manmohan Singh, and president Pratibha Patil.

“I am killing myself because I have no money to repay my debts after two years of crop failure as it did not rain.” That in less than a month, Maharashtra would celebrate its golden jubilee might not have crossed his mind.

In the long list of farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha, his was one more addition. But he made it a point to tell the world why. “I have an SBI crop loan to be repaid.

My son and his wife, both farmers, also have outstanding loans,” 65-year-old Raut wrote in his suicide note that the police say it found on him in his four and a half acre rain-fed farm. “The bank employees came twice to recover the loan, and I wonder how we are all going to repay our outstanding loans,” reads his note. “It’s with this thought that I am leaving this world,” he wrote before consuming pesticide, a recourse many of the 200,000 farmers in the country — 40,000-plus in Maharashtra — have taken between 1997 and 2008.

A fourth-class literate, Raut wrote separately to the police, requesting it not to trouble his family, and to the talathi (keeper of village accounts). “Do conduct an inquiry and waive all the outstanding loans on me, my son and my daughter-in-law,” he pleaded. His note ended thus: “Kindly give a crop loan to my son and daughter-in-law for the 2010 season, so that they don’t meet a fate like mine.”

Collectively, the family owes the banks Rs1.5 lakh on their 14-acre land. To top the losses, Gajanan had to spend Rs80,000 on the treatment of his son, Abhijeet, 14, who was diagnosed with diabetes in March 2009. The Rauts have already sold their cattle to generate cash for the daily needs.

In Washim’s non-descript Dhotra village inhabited predominantly by the laborious Mali community, Raut’s suicide on April 7 was the first of the two in a month. In western Vidarbha, that figure is nearing 300 since the year began, despite the implementation of several special central and state packages.

A few houses away from Gajanan’s house, Gunwant Raut, 68, committed suicide a week later. He had seven-and-a-half acre land, Rs24,000 worth of bank loan and Rs1.5 lakh from private sources, according to his widow Rukmini. “To repay the bank loans, he kept borrowing from private lenders.”

As Maharashtra celebrated its golden jubilee, Raut’s suicide note raises poignant questions about the state of agriculture in rain-fed areas like Vidarbha, where this year’s drought is beginning to ring in despair.

“It’s an occasion to introspect,” Nagpur MP Vilas Muttemwar said, as an all-party platform on conferring statehood to Vidarbha boycotted the May Day function. “The farmers are killing themselves in hundreds, children are malnourished, there is drought. The question the government should be asking is — is this the time for celebration or contemplation?” he asked.

Two successive years of bad monsoon has negated the loan waiver sop even as bank and private loans on farmers are climbing once again, and this time the amounts are staggering. The Mali community, said a farmer in Dhotra, is particularly hard hit. “We usually grow vegetables,” said Nandkishor Raut, a relative of the Rauts. “With no rain or ground water, our farms have taken the worst hit.” Across the region, many of the recent farmers’ suicides are from this community.

Rattled by the two suicides, the villagers now huddle together in the temple every evening after dinner. “We make sure all of us come to the temple every evening,” said Nandkishor. “We try not to leave anyone alone.”