Agriculture: Harvest of Death

Impoverished farmers switch to lucrative cash crops, little realising this will trap them in a cycle of crop-failure and debt.

On a desolate four-acre plot of black soil in Afzalpur, Karnataka, stand knee-high, leafless stalks of tur (Bengal gram), seared brown by a blazing 45 degree Celsius sun. This was once Satappa Kudari's field of dreams. A marginal farmer, he had sowed his field with seeds of the cash crop, hoping to reap an overnight harvest of riches. Today, there is no sign of that dream as the stalks prepare to keel over and scatter into the dust of the Deccan Plateau from whence they sprang.

In these fields of dying dreams sits Dudhamma, his wife. Like the empty streams scarring the barren land around her, the lines on her face are etched deep, aging her beyond her 51 years. Behind her is home: a flimsy two-room thatched hut where once she and her husband eked out a living on their four-acre farm. On April 10, Satappa, oppressed by a loan of Rs 22,000 that had exploded into a debt nearly four times as large, simply drank half a litre of insecticide. "I have to borrow money to make jowar roti," whispers Dudhamma, crying softly as she recalls that unreal night when she watched her son lay the rigid body of her husband on their bullock cart. Dudhamma's face is vacant now. She gazes, unseeing, at a decaying black gumbaz (dome) on the horizon. It is a leftover from Gulbarga's glory days when this barren outpost of black soil and misery was the centre of the 14th century Bahmani kingdom. There is -- as the dying farmers and desolate villages indicate -- no longer any glory left in this land.

It is much the same in large swathes of India's great plains where poor farmers seem to be surrounded by a hopelessness so intense that they jump into wells. They hang themselves. Many find escape at the bottom of a bottle of bug-killing chemicals. "For the farmer, life appears to have become a long, dark tunnel with no end in sight," admits Union Minister for Agriculture Som Pal. "It, therefore, drives him to suicide." More than 200 farmers have killed themselves since December in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra's Vidharba region. In the miserable, failed land of Bundelkhand, more than 300 died in the past three years, an India Today investigation showed last month. There could easily be more. It is the manifestation of a rot spreading -- unseen and, until now, unheard -- through the body of this land. It is a crumbling of one of society's foundations, the precursor, many say, to anarchy in India's vast hinterland. More disturbing is the fact that it is not only the marginal farmer being affected: many who committed suicide are farmers with larger landholdings and greater affluence.

All the farmers who died were trying to speed along the fast lane of agricultural success. Most of them had replaced traditional crops with lucrative cash crops, little realising that raising them is a costly and precise science. This requirement was impossible to meet, given that the farmers today are ignored by the agriculture credit system of banking, squeezed dry by moneylenders and abandoned by the complete breakdown in the Government's agricultural extension services. Their life is like a house of cards: built on paper-thin supports. Take one away -- like a failed monsoon, an overdose of pesticide -- and everything comes crashing down. It means, practically, the end of the road. "The suicides are a manifestation of a complete economic breakdown," says Balram Jakhar, former Union agriculture minister, who recently toured the suicide-ridden areas of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

The truth is that the much-bragged about Green Revolution transformed life only in the irrigated areas. That's just 51 million hectares (MHA) of India's total cropland of 186 MHA. It is in this vast, wretched hinterland that the marginal farmer lives, as dependent as his forefathers were on the vagaries of the monsoons. But his life is immeasurably worse in these times of El Nino, growing families and fragmenting land, and the decrepitude of his leaders and administrators.

In Karnataka, many families have received a token Rs 10,000, either used to cover cremation expenses or snatched by the moneylender. Meanwhile, politicians furiously try to score brownie points in trying to get the Government to sanction compensation. The Maharashtra Government, obsessed with verbal skulduggery, has paid Rs 1 lakh each to the families of five "identified" victims, while other deaths are "under investigation". The Government doesn't recognise many as "debt deaths". Why? Because the farmers did not leave suicide notes behind.

Lost in their own selfish harmonies instead of listening to the sound of a world burning outside their doors, the knee-jerk reactions of politicians would be laughable, if they weren't so tragic. The ruling Shiv Sena in Maharashtra now wants to videotape some of the families to show that not all the farmers killed themselves; some, say the Sena, died from cholera, perhaps old age. Forget the stupefying callousness.

The bigger problem is that there is a massive rural nexus at work, a cornering of money by a flourishing village elite, from moneylenders to pesticide dealers to rich farmers, all backed by local politicians and bureaucrats. They are like dams, blocking the flow of a river of funds, until only a trickle is left. Take barren Gulbarga, a pocket borough of the Guttedar (translated: contractor) family. The district cooperative bank is run by Subhash Guttedar, a relative of Districts Minister Malikaya Guttedar, a Janata Dal legislator from Aland Taluk. The Guttedars also have a contract for construction work on a local dam, under construction now for 25 years, in the heart of the destitute district. Farmers say Subhash is never available for help. And Malikaya -- famous for zipping around in an air-conditioned Mercedes in a district where a Maruti is a rarity -- is now absconding, with the Maharashtra Police wanting to question him for his alleged link in a murder case. The usurping of benefits is easier with Gulbarga's literacy rate: less than 25 per cent. "How do you expect farmers to read brochures or hear of government programmes?" asks a bitter Murugendra Math, a farmer who made a loss of Rs 80,000 on his 10-acre farm in Chincholi town.

Local officials rarely do their job; they never did. Many blame the farmers instead. "Agricultural experts go, but farmers don't listen," says Rajiv Jalota, district collector of Yavatmal. Farmer after marginal farmer interviewed in four states laughed derisively at the mysterious, almost mythical, creatures called agriculture extension workers. "I have not seen a gram sevak (rural worker) or anyone from the government to advise us in my 60 years," says Nagappa Hadpad whose son Subanna, 35, swallowed pesticide and died last month in Karnataka's Tumkunta village. From the traditional jowar which fetched him Rs 600 a quintal, Subanna switched to tur that would get him Rs 2,000 -- he wanted to reap a fortune. But apart from dousing his fields relentlessly with costly pesticide, he just didn't know how.

The farmer has every right to his dreams. The quickest and only way to rise above his below-the-poverty-line existence is to plant his field with cash crops, which can multiply returns by 300 to 700 per cent. A case in point is Warangal where the cotton area was just 500 hectares in 1983. It skyrocketed to 1.25 lakh hectares in 1997, displacing traditional crops like jowar and oil seeds. Monoculture is economically viable only for the first five years. Then it declines, affecting the farmer's economy and making him think of cash crops. Says I.V. Subba Rao, vice-chancellor of Acharya N.G. Ranga Agriculture University, "Monoculture is usually abandoned because they want to make their economic future secure."

But the government must provide the mostly illiterate farmers with expert help: what pesticide to use, how much, warn them of pests and how to tackle them. Modern agriculture is no longer about praying to God for rains and waiting to reap what has been sown. It is a complex -- and costly -- job involving new hybrid varieties and a bewildering range of fertilisers and insecticides. "With small landholdings, low productivity, low income and high indebtedness, he has no reserves to fall back on after consecutive crop failures," says Som Pal, himself a farmer.

But there are few solutions for the final push to the suicides: the eternal debt trap. Pesticide dealers are, in a sense, another face of that hidden hand of the farmer's banking system: the moneylender. It is here that there has been a systematic failure. The rural banking system that the country hoped to build is on the verge of collapsing. Reserve Bank of India figures indicate that 94 per cent of the credit needs of the rural poor (households with assets worth less than Rs 1,000) are met by moneylenders. Despite the spread of banking, only 17 per cent of all money given for development goes to agriculture. Banks, reluctant to loan money to defaulting farmers, have pushed the farmer deeper and deeper into the welcoming arms of the reviled, but reliable, moneylender. In suicide-ridden Warangal district, cooperative banks loaned only Rs 4.98 crore -- against a target of Rs 175 crore. And if you think a 19 per cent interest on a car loan is exorbitant, it might be sobering to realise that already destitute farmers must end up paying anything from 36 to 400 per cent as interest. Moneylenders are gaining such a grip over rural life that other parts of India could face apocalyptic situations like Bundelkhand where entire villagers have fled to urban squalor to escape the brutal army of the moneylender. In the suicide-plagued areas of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the hold of the moneylender is as yet subtle, not openly tyrannical. It is a tribute to their ingenuity, power and "friendly" image that in dozens of villages the locals -- even widows of farmers driven to death by debt -- refuse to disclose the identity of the moneylender.

And the failures continue. The men who run India's giant agricultural science network freely acknowledge the overdosing of cash crops with pesticides and the resultant spread of pests now resistant to poisons, but the solutions they proffer are weak. "We perhaps need a more aggressive extension approach," says R.S. Paroda, director-general of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research. It's true, as Paroda says, that there have been no suicides in Tamil Nadu, a state with conditions similar to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. That could well be because Tamil Nadu runs an aggressive programme of informing its farmers of how pests can be controlled with a delicate balance of natural predators and biologically safe pesticides.

The only short-term way to stop farmers trapping themselves in the vicious cycle of death after a pest attack or a drying up of the rain is crop insurance. Again, instead of getting crop insurance schemes off the ground, politicians are busy announcing compensation for crop losses. "Freebies never work," says S.S. Johal, farm economist and former chairman of the Agricultural Commodities Price Commission. "For the past four decades, the government has been fiddling with the idea of crop insurance." Each state only has to set up an agricultural insurance corporation with a start-up capital of Rs 50 crore, "keep its hands off" and let it run like a business. The policies would sustain themselves and also provide the critical buffer the farmer needs against crop failures.

Som Pal says the Ministry of Agriculture is also proposing a chain of licensed storehouses. Farmers can store their stocks here and obtain receipts, against which they can get bank credit. It's a good idea. But for now this is not reality. Unless the Government does all it says it will, there will continue to be only one grim reality for the Indian farmer: death.

MAHADEV KINIKAR, 52, Veni Kotha village, VIDHARBHA

"We couldn't cash the cheque for Rs 400. It came in my dead husband's name.

The Rs 400 cheque from the Government that reached Indirabai this May was useless. Compensation for the hailstorm that destroyed her husband's crop in December 1997, the cheque was too late. Her husband Mahadev was dead. Burdened by two crop failures and an unpayable debt of Rs 32,000, he had jumped into a well on March 25. There was a final reminder of the Government's callousness: the cheque was in Mahadev's name and unusable. "These things happen," says Yavatmal Collector Rajiv Jalota. But why the delay? "Because of the cumbersome procedures." So much for procedure. The day after the cheque arrived, Chief Minister Manohar Joshi visited Indirabai. Suddenly the entire district administration was at Indirabai's doorstep, cleaning the area, repairing roads. Joshi then gave the widow a cheque for Rs 1 lakh.

It was not over. Indirabai was also the only one of the 22 Vidharbha widows to directly accuse a moneylender, Shivram Pachgarhe, of driving a farmer to suicide. The police said there was no evidence. And Pachgarhe, who denies he is a moneylender, says he was "helping Mahadev" for the past five years because the pesticide shop would not give him credit. He won't get his money back. Neither will Indirabai her husband.

N K Singh

SATAPPA KUDARI, 55, Afzalpur village, GULBARGA

"I saw him drinking the pesticide after we had had dinner."

Like the skies above the Deccan plateau, Dudhamma's eyes are empty. Two seasons of scanty rainfall and an invasion of pod borers was enough to kill not just all hopes of sustenance but her husband Satappa Kudari, 55. In an attempt to break the shackles of penury, Kudari had decided to go for the cash-rich tur instead of the more traditional crops. He expended his sweat -- and money -- to buy insecticide, fertiliser and even a pipeline from the river Bhima, 200 m away. But nature denied him success -- when the drying skies and pests threw his precariously balanced life off the edge. One failure meant that Kudari sank deeper into despair and debt and there were no government schemes to help him out.

Relief from life came on April 10 from a can of the same insecticide that failed to kill the pests. "I saw him drinking the pesticide after we had dinner that night," recalls Dudhamma, her frail body racked by anguished sobs. "He said he had received notices from the bank and the moneylenders, but there was no money at home." If the state Government is generous, they will give her Rs 1 lakh, as they sometimes do. It will immediately go to the moneylenders: Kudari had borrowed Rs 22,000, but as of December, the suffocating interest had pushed that up to Rs 70,000. What now? "Only God," she whispers, "can help me."

Stephen David and Samar Halarnkar

LAXMANRAO G. RAUT, 52, Mandwa village, VIDHARBHA

"Now we eat these rotis, something even the animals don't touch.

Laxmanrao raut was a happy-go-lucky driver with the Maharashtra State Electricity Board. But the driving only brought in pocket money. The real money came from his six acres of land in Vidharbha's Wardha district. As things go in this part of the country, Laxmanrao -- who hardly fits the bracket of a marginal farmer -- was reasonably well off. Yet, the lure of easy lucre got to him. Cotton -- that king of crops -- had been on his mind. And last season, he decided to sow the seeds for prosperity. But things went awry all along. First, boll worms started making a meal of his crops. Then, to get rid of them he bought on credit vast quantities of pesticide. While the pesticide did not kill the insects, it ruined the wheat growing alongside. In April this year, Laxmanrao's fields were history -- and his debts over Rs 40,000:Rs 3,400 to banks, Rs 8,000 to "villagers" (as moneylenders are euphemistically called) and Rs 30,000 to a credit cooperative society. Sucked into a financial black hole, Laxmanrao sat down and drank a glass of leftover pesticide. What shackled him in debt, finally set him free, forever. Today, his family tries hard to survive. And they do so on the same pesticide-infested wheat that brought about their ruin. His wife -- Chabutai -- points to a basketful of roti and says, "Now we eat this, something even the animals don't touch."

N K Singh