(Truth vs Hype: How the Indian state evades culpability for rural distress)
In January, Ramesh Khamankar, a cotton farmer in Maharashtra's Yavatmal district walked to his ruined fields and drank from a bottle of pesticide. He died a few hours later. He was 57.
His death followed a pattern of suicides stretching back almost a decade in Maharashtra's cotton belt, two hours east of Nagpur, which brutally telegraph the crisis roiling Indian agriculture.
For years, the state and central government resisted the argument that suicides are linked to rural distress, blaming other factors, like personal troubles or alcoholism. Over the years, however, they grudgingly evolved a mechanism to determine whether rural distress - a term coined to explain lost crops or mounting debts could be the main factor for the hundreds of farmer deaths in the region.
Ramesh Khamankar's case was determined to be a 'genuine farmer suicide', and his family received a compensation of Rs 1 lakh months after he died.
But government functionaries - political or bureaucratic - continue to duck responsibility for the causes of rural distress. When pressed, they take recourse to a rehearsed litany: mounting debt, crop failure, erratic rainfall, rising input costs, climate change, reeling these factors off almost as if they are a cosmic malaise and not the outcome of very specific policy decisions taken or not taken.
To decipher what makes making farming a precarious, potentially life-threatening profession - and who is responsible - can be a bewildering, almost Kafkaesque exercise.
Let's take the first and most commonly cited reason: debt.
Shailesh, Ramesh Khamankar's son, told us that after three years of being defeated by the rain, his father owed about 2.5 lakhs to the local bank. 2012 and 2013 saw no rain, 2014 brought too much. He walked us through the devastation: seven acres of unusable standing cotton, three acres of
bhindi withered at the stem.
The agricultural loan his father had taken would have been interest-free for the first year; after that, a 4 per cent interest applies. But his family was also saddled with heavier debt, an amount which they were unwilling to reveal. They claimed that money had been borrowed from family and friends, a euphemism for private moneylenders or
sahukars. Several attempts have been made to ban
sahukars, but they remain an omnipresent, if invisible, presence in Vidarbha.
In the Yavatmal wholesale market nearby, a group of farmers told us most of them are in heavily in debt to
sahukars, who charge interest at the steep rate of 10 per cent a month. This means that at the end of a sowing season, farmers have to repay almost double what they borrowed.
Why do they go to
sahukars? Because banks do not lend enough.
For each acre of cotton, farmers invest close to Rs 25,000. In a bad year, the costs shoot up, because the fields are planted more than once. This year, it was almost Rs 40,000 an acre, said Shailesh Khamankar.
Banks in Yavatmal only lend a maximum of Rs 12,400 an acre.
This is not a new practise. Ajay Dube, a local BJP activist, who has studied lending patterns by Yavatmal's banks for the last 10 years, said, "The farmer always gets 50 percent less than what he actually needs from the banks, sometimes even less."
This pushes farmers into a vicious cycle - their credit needs are met by private lenders, increasing the risk that they will default on their bank loans, drawing them deeper into private debt.
Who is to blame for the reluctance of banks?
At the Yavatmal office of the Central Bank of India, the lead bank in the district, GG Pimpale, the bank manager, told us that a district-level committee made up of local bureaucrats and bank officials determine credit limits before each season. "All the members collectively come to a decision," he said. But Ajay Dube pointed out that it's the bank representative who sets the agenda in the committee. "Banks don't profit from giving loans on low interest rates. That's why banks want to give the least amount of money."
In a recent speech to bankers in Mumbai, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked them to lend generously to farmers.
But these appeals are not new, and have not made much difference in the past. According to RBI figures, the amount loaned by banks to farmers, as a percentage of overall loans, has shrunk from 20% in the 1980s to 8% in 2013 - less than half of the RBI's targets for such lending.
Repeated attempts by NDTV to contact officials from the country's top public sector banks got no responses. Finally, a high-ranking official from the State Bank of India spoke to us on the condition of anonymity. We asked him why banks lent at such unfavourable rates to farmers, given that they have no qualms in lending to private projects at a 80-20 debt to equity ratio (80 per cent from the bank, 20 per cent from the promoter), despite many such loans remaining unpaid.
The official expressed surprise at the fact that rates of lending were below the needs of farmers. "This is news to me," he said, promising to get back to us. He still hasn't.
But even if the banks fall short, what of other safety nets for farmers that are meant to be in place - like crop insurance? Or direct compensation?
When he took a loan from the local bank, Ramesh Khamankar had automatically signed up for an insurance scheme, most likely from the Agricultural Insurance Company of India (AIC). The insurance is built into the loan, and so several farmers - like the Khamankar family - are unaware of its existence.
But given that they had insurance, why didn't they receive any money when the crops failed? Mr Pimpale, bank manager, explained to us that the insurance covers the loan, not the crop. Unknown to Ramesh Khamankar, a part of his debt may have been adjusted against the insurance amount.
That is, of course, if the insurance companies had come down and assessed the extent of crop damage in their corner of Yavatmal. Had anyone visited, we asked? No one, said Shailesh Khamankar.
Ask other farmers in Yavatmal, and the answers are similar: how crop insurance works, how it is assessed, how it can be claimed - these are questions surrounded by a fog of confusion.
According to Vijay Jawandhia of the Shetkari Sanghatana, a prominent farmers' organization, "No information is given to farmers. What is the insurance cover, how much of this will be compensated, nothing is communicated."
Who is meant to help farmers know what they are entitled to? Nobody, apparently.
We turned to Ravindra Thakre, the Deputy Commissioner for the Amravati Division, which oversees Vidarbha's six cotton-growing districts, including Yavatmal.
He told us that workers of the Agricultural Department regularly visit farmers to counsel them on farming methods, including on matters of credit and insurance.
Not a single farmer we interviewed in Yavatmal had been visited anyone from the government. The only ones who do come regularly, says Shailesh Khamankar, are representatives of private seed companies, who hold extensive presentations on their latest products!
There is meant to be another safety net - the government's compensation package- meant to protect farmers in case of natural calamities and poor yields.
Shailesh said they did get a cheque, amounting to Rs 4,500 per hectare, which works out to a paltry 8 per cent of their input costs.
The scale of compensation is fixed by the Agriculture Ministry in Delhi. The Union Minister, Radha Mohan Singh, said the government was considering raising it. And it did this week, too, with the Prime Minister announcing a scaling up by 50 per cent. (For the Khamankars, this would have made little difference; the new amount, of Rs 6750, would still be much below the Rs 60,000 they spent per hectare).
MS Swaminathan, who chaired the National Farmers Commission, finds a consistent pattern of depleting support to agriculture, starting from the 1990's.
Mr Swaminathan believes that governments - new and old - are making a mistake by believing "that agricultural problems have been solved. The economics of agriculture is becoming much more unfavourable to the farmers and the real cost of it will be not to make younger people enthusiastic about agriculture as a profession."
For Shailesh Khamankar, his father's death has ironically reversed his attempt to find a life away from the farm. He is a second-year engineering student at a college in Bhopal, but now doesn't have the Rs 60,000 needed to continue his studies.
His bloodshot eyes scan his father's barren fields. "I'll have to come back here. But after that, I do not know."