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In the past six years, 2,000 to 3,000 farmers (the state has not compiled an official tally) are believed to have committed suicide in this state, Andhra Pradesh, many of them in this arid district. Fifty to 100 have killed themselves since a new state government took office in mid-May, promising farmers relief.
A help line set up by the government on May 22 had already logged more than 800 calls a week later. The template of the calls - dry land and crushing debt - never varied, nor did their desperate tone. Nine wells failed on 10 acres owned by a farmer and he owed $4,400 to banks and moneylenders. Other one had two dry wells on 20 acres, and owed $5,777. The people at the help line took down the details, and promised that an official would follow up. Most of the suicidal farmers have swallowed pesticides, the easiest killer at hand. Burdened by compound interest, they compound tragedy, leaving families their debts, and depriving them of fathers, husbands and breadwinners, now they will go to other farmers\\' fields to labor for 45 cents a day.
India has seen spates of similar suicides in recent years, in states fromPunjab to Kerala. In part, the suicides reflect a rural culture in which excess indebtedness becomes a mark of shame, which private moneylenders and public creditors milk to try to collect. Agriculture, which supports two-thirds of India's more than one billion people, generates only one-quarter of its gross domestic product. In the past five years, while the services sector has grown an average of 8 percent a year, agriculture has grown just 2 percent a year.
India's new government rode to power partly on the back of farmers angst, but salving it will not be easy. In the farmers plight, all the strands of an economy in transition intersect. This area had four successive years of drought, but the farmers have been buffeted by more than weather. With small landholdings, constrained markets for their products, and an overdependence on subsidies for power and fertilizer, India's farmers were ill equipped to compete when the national government undertook economic reforms in 1991.
To a degree, the suicides reflect the farmers\\' bafflement at the gradual, and erratic, withdrawal of the state. They have felt the cost of reforms - but have yet to see the benefits. In some villages, the cost of powering the pumps had risen sevenfold in recent years, with the state government trying to wean farmers off free power.
The cost of fertilizers had risen, too, as the government sought to reduce subsides. Most of the farmers had regularly lost crops to drought, dry wells and pests in the past seven years. They had stopped farming cotton because of pests, which drove hundreds of farmers to suicide inWarangal, another of the state's districts. In October, by the time they scraped together the money to spray their crop, the pests had gotten it. Bank officers regularly came to visit, many banks took legal action. The moneylenders regularly harassed them. This led to many loosing their lands through auctioned As access to formal credit has narrowed, the power of moneylenders - who charge at least 24 percent annual interest - has grown.
Most states spend the bulk of their budgets on debt interest and salaries, which has left almost nothing to invest in irrigation. Ninety percent of this district is unirrigated, and thus depends on rain for water.
Agricultural markets remain heavily regulated, and because there are few facilities here to process agricultural products, almost every crop must be exported to another state, something beyond small farmers\\' capacity. They sell cheap to middlemen, who harvest far greater profit across state lines.
The opening of the Indian economy to imports has affected farmers as well. Some farmers in this district planted mulberry trees to produce silk - but demand dropped as raw Chinacountry-region silk began flowing in. The main crop here, groundnut, or peanut, is processed into oil, but recently the poor have been forsaking local peanut oil for cheaper palm oil fromSoutheast Asia.
For now, the new state government is focusing on the symptoms of farmer distress, not the causes. Its first act was to declare free power for farmers and clear their arrears. The short-term relief will only add to the state's fiscal deficit, making infrastructure investment and power sector reform much harder.
Politicians also held a rally inHyderabad, the state capital, to beg farmers not to take their lives, and state officials set up the help line as a mere formality, after going through all this one gets to know the real depth of a debt.
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