Nanabhau Ajinath Todkar was the first farmer to commit suicide on his village of Khanpur.
It is mid-April and the Beed district of Marathwada has already seen 44 farmer suicides since the beginning of the year.
32-year-old Nanabhau Ajinath Todkar was the first farmer to commit suicide in his village of Khanapur.
With a collective debt of Rs 1,87,000 from two government and one co-operative bank, his family says that Mr Todkar could no longer bear the burden and hanged himself to death from a tree.
A cotton farmer, his yield failed last year due to a delay in the monsoon and was just a meagre 1.5 quintals. Far less than the 30 quintals he had expected. He had spent Rs 50,000 which fetched him just Rs 6,000 for the harvest. The failure kicked in a fresh cycle of debt.
His wife Seema, who has now inherited her husband's debt, doesn't know how she will repay it. "I have two sons who are five and seven years old. If I can't repay it then I'll take the same step that my husband did and will have to go like him."
The Todkar family collectively owes nearly Rs 10 lakh to banks which they have borrowed over the last five to six years. Mr Todkar's two brothers work in Pune but don't earn enough to repay the banks.
Kantilal Ajinath Todkar says, "Meand my younger brother have seven to eight lakhs as debt. Including my father's we have 10 lakhs that we need to repay. We hope to do that whenever we have a good harvest."
The Devendra Fadnavis government has been resisting a Uttar Pradesh-like multi-crore loan waiver for Maharashtra's farmers, giving the logic that it's not a long lasting solution to their problems. However, Chief Minister Fadnavis has said that his government is studying the Uttar Pradesh model.
Mr Todkar's brother Ram says, "A waiver will be good as it may stop the suicides."