Deaths of farmers in UP’s Bundelkhand region are accidental, insists the state, and not due to distress caused by unseasonal rainsVikram Singh remembers the last days of his elder brother Jitendra with clarity. Thirty five-year-old Jitendra was a farmer who lived in a remote village in Jalaun district in southwest Uttar Pradesh. The district is situated in the drought-prone Bundelkhand region which has been fighting acute agricultural distress for the past decade.

This year, Jitendra was more optimistic about life than in earlier years when he had to suffer losses repeatedly on account of drought.



He expected a decent harvest and planned to marry off his eldest daughter. Jitendra even found a suitable boy from the neighbouring village and fixed a tentative date in May.

But then Bundelkhand was hit by unseasonal rains and hailstorm in the last week of March. When Jitendra visited his farm he found that his pea crop was washed away. “Since that day, Jitendra stopped talking to anyone in the family and locked himself up in his room,” says Vikram.Earlier this week, Jitendra hanged himself in his room. “He had given his word to the bridegroom’s family. The humiliation led him to commit suicide,” said Vikram. The farmer is survived by four children and his wife.In another village nearby, the relatives of another farmer are mourning too. Mahavir Singh saw the destruction caused by the unseasonal rains and collapsed on the field. By the time his relatives carried him home, he was dead. Mahavir had also planned to marry off his daughter post-harvest. Both farmers had piled up debts due to the frequent spells of drought.Stories of farmers committing suicide or dying of heart attacks on the field have become fairly commonplace in the region. Conversations between farmers from different villages begin with “another one gone today”. The local newspapers also report these incidents regularly. So it appears strange that the only people who do not appear to have any knowledge about these deaths are the local district administration and the state government officials who operate out of Lucknow.The district collector as well as the chief secretary of the state have issued statements to the effect that they were yet to receive information about farmer suicides in the region. Villagers here say their lives are now perennially dedicated to settling the debts and when they are unable to do so, they take the hard way out. Typically, a farmer takes loans through the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme and, when he is unable to pay back, he takes additional loans from local moneylenders.When the crop fails as badly as it has this time, he finds that no one from the administration even bothers to assess the damage to the crop. This means that the insurance money due to him rarely materializes and the compensation too is awarded after lengthy paperwork. Devoid of support from the government agencies at this point, dozens of farmers in the region have taken the extreme step of killing themselves.Talking to ET Magazine, more than 30 villagers in Jalaun said they are also harassed by the police department when they are unable to repay loans. “Even as we get picked up by the police, the moneylenders’ goons will be waiting for us when we get back from the police station,” said a farmer.The KCC scheme is supplemented with crop insurance, the premium for which is deducted by the banks concerned and deposited with the insurance companies associated with the scheme. The KCC scheme is aimed at providing timely and affordable credit to farmers in India.The scheme was started in 1998-99. It allows farmers to have cash credit facilities without going through time-consuming bank credit screening processes. The card is issued on the basis of land held by the farmer and he needs to provide documentation for the same as security.The card is valid for three years and is subject to annual renewals. Withdrawals are made using slips, cards and a passbook. The premium for crop insurance is deducted automatically from the farmer’s account.Lalita Prasad, 67, says he speaks for the entire village when he points out that he has never received any award through the insurance scheme although he has suffered losses more than once. Two dozen farmers who surround him nod their heads in approval. Research conducted by ET Magazine threw up three broad trends, all of which suggest that the farmer suicides are on account of the callousness of the administration.Firstly, the political leadership has not put any pressure on the bureaucracy to verify the reports of suicides. Secondly, the senior officials entrusted with the job at the district level have not issued instructions to the lower-ranking officials such as lekhpals (who prepare assessment reports) to visit the farmers and assess damages promptly. Finally, farmers say, the lekhpal does not process a file without taking a bribe.“Even if the case is that of an impoverished family seeking compensation after the head of the family has committed suicide, the field officers will ask for their cut. From getting a bank loan to assessment of crop loss, your work gets done only after a minimum of 10% of the amount is handed over to the officials,” says a farmer who did not wish to be named. According to Sanjay Singh, an activist with Parmarth, an NGO based out of Jhansi, the first thing required in Bundelkhand to fight rural distress is a massive anti-corruption campaign. “We need something like the anti-corruption helpline started in Delhi.”According to Singh the laborious verification process has made life difficult for the farmers. “When you know there has been loss, why don’t you just pay the compensation taking into account the aggregate loss and size of farms? Why do you need to do so much of individual verification? This is opening the door for corruption,” said Singh.The activist, who has been campaigning against rural distress in Bundelkhand for over a decade, says the lekhpals collect around Rs 1,000 per crop failure report. “On an average there would be around a hundred reports that need to be drafted in a village and they get to pocket around `1 lakh per village just for assessing the damage. Those who don’t pay simply do not figure in the process,” he added.A manager with a leading bank that issues KCCs agreed that the follow-up on insurance claims by the companies concerned was below par. “The farmers themselves have no clue about how they can get their claim. No awareness programmes have been conducted to educate them about how the loss is computed and claims processed.If we need to improve the efficacy of the programme, the farmer needs to know that he has a right to his claim.” Anil Sharma, a representative of the Association for Democratic Reforms who has been documenting the inefficacy of institutions in these parts, says there are many villages where people do not know how the government functions and what their basic rights are. “People do not get any help from the government. To make matters worse, climate change is beginning to cause a severe impact on agriculture so much so that we can say that farming could well be dying a slow death,” said Sharma.Sharma says illegal mining is responsible for the severe swing in climate in the region . “The green cover in this area has been destroyed and this is because the political system makes money through mining. Years of cutting trees and over-exploitation of resources and destruction of the hills have contributed to the severity of the situation here,” says Sharma.Some estimates suggest that as many as 100 farmers may have committed suicide in Bundelkhand till April this year. Due to the repetitive cycles of misery, a large number of farmers have migrated to Delhi and other towns in North India in search of work.Just when, after several dry spells, it looked as if things couldn’t get worse, farmers were greeted with their harvest being washed away by untimely rains and hail. “The lekhpal had visited our house and he knows that my brother committed suicide. I don’t know why he did not prepare a report and send it to the government or how the government can claim that they don’t know about the suicides,” says the relative of a farmer who committed suicide a fortnight ago.The Uttar Pradesh government said that damage to crops had spread to 40 districts and said the monetary losses were now upwards of `1,100 crore. UP chief secretary Alok Ranjan, however, maintained that none of the deaths of farmers reported since late March this year were suicides and classified them as accidental deaths caused by lightning and other such. “There is no conclusive proof yet that any of the suicides that have been reported have anything to do with unseasonal, heavy rains,” he said.The farmers are angry with the state government for the lack of urgency shown to meet the challenge of rural distress. They are also unhappy with the Centre for not moving fast enough to come to their aid. “We had huge expectations from the Narendra Modi government.But they are nowhere to be seen after the elections,” said Raghubir, a farmer from Mahoba village. According to the 27-year-old youngster, making announcements on compensation alone will not be enough. “The state government is not doing anything. The Centre needs to play a more decisive role. But if they just announce compensation without ensuring that the state bureaucracy plays its role in computing losses and processing files, it will be of no use. The farmers of the region desperately need the Narendra Modi we were promised. I hope he will take charge and ensure some action is taken on the ground.”