Chances are no one’s heard about Azad’s death in Bachlapur village though Lalitpur, where the Congress, the BSP and the SP are in a battle for votes, is only 15 km away. Farmer suicides aren’t an election plank and parties prefer trading corruption charges. Rahul Gandhi’s much-touted Bundelkhand development authority proposal remains just that. More than 500 committed suicide in the Bundelkhand region last year.
Azad’s was a classic case. He had two outstanding loans of Rs 50,000 each. The father of two, from an upper caste family, consumed poison and died at his farm on February 6. Locals remember a simple man. His father, Rathi Ram, recounts the hardships his son faced. Azad had worried day and night about repaying loans taken on the Kisan credit card and from the moneylender. Unlike in previous years, when drought killed crops largely due to the administration’s failure to harvest water, this year a severe frost destroyed a local variant of peas on Azad’s farm. “The frost destroyed the little chance he had of repaying the loans,” Rathi Ram says.
Lalitpur has seven dams and water aplenty, but the farmers get none of it. The lack of irrigation facilities here leaves farmers vulnerable to the vagaries of nature.
An Allahabad HC order last year took suo motu action on farmer suicides, asking the state government and the rural development ministry to report the cause of each suicide and furnish details of relief offered to the bereaved. The RBI ordered banks to stop mortgaging farmlands in the event of loan defaulting and directed them to offer relief in the form of easy instalments over 10 years.
The idea was to remove fear of loan-recovery agents. But, it takes time for directives to translate into tangible realities. As we leave, word comes of a young farmer couple near Jhansi who had decided to end their lives.