Avinash Gondge had a dream. The young Dalit farmer wanted to move his family out of their hut into a permanent concrete-and-brick house. For this, he took a home loan of around Rs 80,000 on his mother's name in 2012.
But before he could finish building the house, in November 2014, the family was forced to migrate for seasonal work in a sugarcane factory in Karnataka. Through the year, successive waves of unseasonal weather – hail, rain, and drought – had devastated everything that the family planted on their small parcel of land in the village of Ramnagar in Maharashtra's Beed district. The losses ultimately consumed Avinash's life. Unable to bear the humiliation of seasonal migration, the 23-year-old ended his life by hanging himself.
His death was documented far from home in a macabre photograph that caught him standing upright, albeit with a bent neck. The image was taken with the assumption that it would come handy in getting the family Rs one lakh that Maharashtra government grants to the families of farmers who commit suicide.
But unbeknownst to Avinash's family, the administration has declared them ineligible for the compensation.
They are not the only ones. A Right to Information application filed by Mumbai-based activist Jeetendra Ghadge showed that in the last four years almost half of the families that applied for suicide compensation in the state were found to be ineligible.
‘If you look at the figures of the National Crime Records Bureau, they will show that over 3,000 farmers have committed suicide every year since 2011,” Ghadge said. “Yet in this period, the Revenue Department received only 5,698 applications for compensation and only 3,460 were approved. What is happening with the rest?”
Narrow criteria
Until some years ago, the government excluded families from compensation if the land was not in the name of the person who had committed suicide. While this has been amended, activists say other conditions continue to squeeze out suicide-hit families.
Maharashtra’s government decides compensation on the basis of three conditions: the person must be a landowning farmer, must have defaulted on a loan from a registered bank or moneylender, and there must be evidence of agricultural loss on the farm.
The conditions might seem sound at first glance, but there are several glaring holes in the process which leave out vast numbers of people working in agriculture.
The first condition, that of owning land, leaves out tenant farmers who might not own the land but continue to invest in it. “Giving land on tenancy is fast increasing,” said Vijay Jawandhia, a noted farmers rights activist from the Shetkari Sanghatna. The government should make tenancy legal." Tenancy is not recognised in Maharashtra at present. Tenant farmers are not counted on official lists either for compensation in the case of unnatural weather such as droughts or hailstorms or if they kill themselves. They are also not eligible for bank loans.
This is partly why the second condition, of having defaulted on a loan taken by a registered bank or moneylender, is difficult to meet.
Credit conundrums
Not only tenant farmers, activists say even landowning farmers could be heavily indebted without any formal proof of a loan. “Farmers are not indebted only to banks,” Jawandhia pointed out. “They take loans from crop merchants to buy seeds, they owe their kirana stores for their daily needs, they even take loans from relatives and the local Krishi Seva Kendra. They will take loans from whatever channel they have. When all channels fail, that is when he might take the decision of suicide.”
Banks are also selective about their criteria for loans. They lend money largely to those farmers who have enough capital to return the loan. There is little wonder then that farmers end up taking loans from unregistered moneylenders, who often charge exorbitant interest rates up to 120%.
Until the government introduces interest-free staggered loans from banks, Jawandhia said, there was no way they could attract farmers away from informal moneylenders.
Long-term distress
A field of cotton ruined by unseasonal rain in March.
The third condition requiring evidence of agricultural loss on the farm is restrictive, say activists, because suicides do not always follow a season of crop damages. Distress in a farmer's life builds up over years of inadequate and uncertain income and is often an outcome of forces larger than himself: a slump in global markets, rising input costs, and other systemic changes in agriculture.
Many times, it is the inability to educate their children or arrange for their marriages that pushes farmers to end their lives.
Last year, in the village of Dhanuri in Osmanabad, 40-year-old Sandipan Babar ended his life following consecutive seasons of crop damages. Seven years ago, in the same village, a 60-year-old Maratha farmer, Vilas Suryawanshi, killed himself days before his youngest son was to be married.
Suryawanshi had taken loans from the bank for his fields, said his daughter-in-law Kalpana, for which he had kept the household gold as surety. He was forced to approach a private (and illegal) moneylender for a final loan of Rs two lakhs for his son's wedding because he had run out of credit with registered lenders.
Thirteen days before his son’s wedding, he invited the girl’s family home to exchange gifts as a part of regular ceremonies. That morning, he went to his field and consumed pesticide. His son now works with the same moneylender to clear his debt.
Beyond compensation
It is a measure of the despair in rural Maharashtra that bereaved families expend much energy in gaining access to the paltry sum of Rs one lakh that is often not even enough to clear the debt that might have caused the suicide in the first place.
After Sandipan Babar died, his wife, Shaira, received Rs 30,000 in hand and the balance in fixed deposits. Her brother had to pay off the rest of the loan that Babar had taken. “How can Rs one lakh be enough to replace a person?” she asked.
While the government's efforts to deal with farm distress and deaths pivot around compensation, it does not address the core issue of why farmers kill themselves in the first place.
It took until November and a new government for Maharashtra to declare a drought-like situation in 19,000 villages in Marathwada and Vidarbha. Its inputs – loan waivers and more subsidies – could at best stem the suicides only temporarily.
In March, the government finally took the first steps to address the systemic cause of the suicides – uncertainty and a lack of financial security. It said that it would consider introducing comprehensive insurance schemes for all farmers. For now, it is still only contemplating the action and it is unclear if or when it will come about. There is also a possibility that the compensation amount would be raised from Rs one lakh to Rs five lakh.
But Avinash Gondge's family is unlikely to get it. The young Dalit man qualified as a farmer, since his family owned the farmland. His death followed a season of agricultural losses. He even had an unpaid loan from a registered moneylender. So why was he not counted eligible for compensation? Because the loan was from an unregistered moneylender for building a house, and not for farming.
“All he wanted to do was to make these fields green,” said his older brother, Sanjay Gondge, talking of how their fields were among the few in the region without borewells. “He used to skip school to work on the farm.”
Until Avinash's death, Sanjay used to work odd jobs in Pune. Now, he has returned to the family's farm to try to conquer the same forces that consumed his brother's life.
This is the second article in a series of reports on the agrarian crisis in Marathwada. The rest of the series is here.