Harvest of tears

From last December to date, as many as 13 farmers of Bidar district have committed suicide like Shivaraj did. What’s more, there seems to be no end to this suicide spiral. It has spread to other districts in northern Karnataka, to Gulbarga, Raichur, Koppal, Gadag and Dharwad.

In fact, the entire Hyderabad Karnataka region, known for its notorious droughts and famines and its socio-economicbackwardness seems to be gripped by a strange hysteria, much like Warangal in Andhra Pradesh was, with many farmers seeking to end their lives rather than to face the total failure of both the kharif and rabi crops. The suicide toll in the northern Karnataka districts stands at 20 at the moment.

Crop failures are not uncommon in these districts. But suicides of this kind are. In 1970, even when there was a severe drought resulting in cattle deaths and distress sale of livestock, people did not resort to the extreme step of ending their lives. Since there is endemic poverty in these areas, landless agricultural labourers and even small and marginal farmers often migrate to other States in search of a livelihood. But this is the first time that they have sought to take their own lives.

Farmers in these districts generally grow two main crops in a year and short duration crops in the intervening spans for some extra income. In the past, they used to get at least one crop a year, which would enable them tomanage until the next agriculture season. The difference this time was that there was virtual devastation of all kind of crops over two agricultural seasons.

What farmers here have always done is to take private loans at exorbitant rates of interest to tide over the difficult times. The rates of interest varied from 24 per cent to 60 per cent per year. Besides these loans, farmers also bought fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides and other inputs from dealers on credit. The pesticide merchants not only charged higher rates but also levied an interest on the borrowings. Such transactions were struck without the benefit of written documents. Moneylenders advanced the money in good faith and the farmers would return the amounts borrowed after the harvest. Although farmers were exploited in such an arrangement, without access to institutional finance they fell easy prey to the wiles of local moneylenders.

Crop insurance is an alien concept for these farmers. Farmers who had availed of institutional loans aremarginally covered by the crop insurance scheme. But about 95 per cent of all the farmers of this area have no such protection. It is only this year that the State Government has seen fit to launch a newly-formulated comprehensive crop insurance scheme in Bijapur district on an experimental basis.

A great many of farmers here, particularly the small holders, are honest and sensitive. They can brave hunger but they fear for their honour. They cannot tolerate the insult of being branded as defaulters. Take the case of 42-year-old Prabhu of Kasartugaon village, who also committed suicide.

Prabhu’s brother, Neelakantha, recalls: “My brother never talked to me about the loans he had availed of. He was so much an introvert that he seldom shared his sorrows and miseries with me or with his friends. It is apparent that he was under pressure from the moneylenders.”

Sixty-year-old Nagappa of Tumkunta village in Chincholi taluka of Gulbarga, whose 35-year-old son Subbanna Hadapad had committed suicide too, sayswith tears in his eyes: “For the last two days my son looked uneasy. He had been talking about his debts. He had taken loans at high interest rates and was not in a position to repay even a fraction of it.” The old man breaks down, “It was a rude shock. We never thought that he would end his life.”

Invariably, those who died were the sole bread-winners in their families. Subbanna’s wife Indamma, as she tries to console her two wailing children, eight-year-old Rani and four-year-old Jagannath, is traumatised. She says: “We don’t know what to do. Somehow we just managed to survive when my husband was alive.”

Ironically, even in the midst of such sorrow and despair, Karnataka Chief Minister J.H. Patel declared that his government was in no way responsible for the suicides. But the inept manner in which his government tackled the crisis has only aggravated it. Instead of tackling the problem at the political level the government chose to order an inquiry by the Corps of Detectives (CoD), a specialisedinvestigation agency within the State Police Department. It was asked to investigate all the cases of suicides by farmers in Bidar district. When the CoD was busy at its task in Bidar, reports came in of similar deaths in the neighbouring district of Gulbarga. The CoD sleuths rushed there as well. By the time they had got back to their Bangalore headquarters, news of suicides from Raichur, Koppal, Gadag and Dharwad had poured in. Needless to say, the CoD could do nothing about them.

The dreaded Heliothis armigera, which periodically attacks the tur crop, is the main reason for this disaster. The untimely rains that this region saw late last year provided the ideal conditions for the pest to breed. As the cotton farmers of Warangal did, here too people made desperate attempts to save their crop by resorting to repeated sprayings of pesticide. But the pest proved immune to this treatment. Ironically, the pesticide that couldn’t kill the pests eventually ended up killing the farmers.

Over the last few years,the local markets have been flooded with ineffective fertilisers and fake pesticides and insecticides. While dealers in these items have minted money by the fistful, the whole farming community has suffered immeasurably. In Bhalki taluka alone, according to a modest estimation, pesticides worth more than Rs 2 crore have been sold. The agriculture department, which is meant to function as the sole controlling authority of this business, proved totally ineffectual in protecting the farmers. Dhanraj of Bhatambra village analyses what went wrong: “We keep on spraying the pesticide solution as advised by the agriculture department — but the pests never die. As an experiment, I put a pest in a solution of Dunet brand of pesticide. To my astonishment the pest simply sailed through the solution.”

According to Karnataka’s agriculture minister C. Byre Gowda, more than 50 brands of pesticides have been found to be substandard in Bidar district alone. So far no action worth the name has been initiated against thedealers, who are the real culprits in this tragic tableau.