A Bitter Harvest in Vidarbha

Where farmers’ suicides are no more than a blip on the election radar despite being discussed for decades, what do people in the suicide-struck region expect from the government that will take power post the results?

- Jinit Parmar

STANDING in the scorching heat beside the gate of his old-style three-room mud house, Pravin Madhukarrao Patil wonders what is next for him. “My father killed himself two years ago due to a Rs 5 lakh debt that caused him more stress than he could handle,” says Patil, a 39-year-old resident of Salora village, 25 km from Maharashtra’s Amravati city. “He told us he was going outside for some work. When he did not return a few hours later, I and my wife went looking for him. We found him hanging on a jamun tree near our farm.”

Looking through his moist eyes, Patil says his father had borrowed the money to grow chana (gram). The three left behind—Patil, his wife and his mother—still await Rs 70,000 they say they were promised as compensation from the state government. “We were told it will take seven more years, and we have no clue why it should take so long,” Patil adds. The Maharashtra government has a scheme under which it gives Rs 1 lakh to the kin of farmers who died by suicide.