In the rich, verdant district of Mandya, perennially irrigated by the winding Visvesvaraya canal, 21 sugarcane farmers have committed suicide over the last 25 days, hardly 100 km from the country’s IT capital of Bengaluru.There is no drought here, no grinding poverty.In fact, in the arid regions of this district, where farmers barely eke out a living, there has not been a single suicide.But here, where there is water in the canal and birds chirping in the air, a code of honour, gross mismanagement in the agriculture sector by successive governments and a collapse in the sugar market have resulted in a situation where every farmer seems to have been pushed into a corner.“See my crop there,” Channe Gowda of Kaagenahalli tells this writer. His crop has gone yellow and dry. His voice is grim, his humour dark. “Do you want to see how we do it? I will pick up matches right now and set fire to the crop. You can take pictures, if you want to.”On July 7, at Gaanadahosuru village, barely 15 km from Kaagenahalli, a physically challenged farmer Ningappa did set fire to his field of sugarcane.Some say it was suicide, others say it was an accident, but Ningappa was burnt alive in that fire, as a horrifying precursor to a spate of sugarcane farmers’ suicides in Mandya.The sense of despair in the region is palpable.The district has a standing sugarcane crop of 40,000 hectares, of which 8,000 hectares need to be harvested immediately, while 1,500 hectares have withered already. None of the five sugarcane factories in Mandya has started crushing or paid the farmers even the 2013-14 dues of Rs 120 crore.Last year, the farmers pulled through thanks to the subsidiary crop of sericul-ture and dairy farming. Come 2015 and cocoon rates have collapsed from Rs 400 a kg last year to Rs 70. Milk rates too have come down. Result: the farmer has no money to either repay earlier loans or for his day-to-day expenses.“We spend Rs 30,000 per acre of sugarcane and take out a crop of about 35 tonnes. If no one takes our crop or pays us our dues for well over a year, how are we supposed to earn a living,” asks gram panchayat member Prabhu in Kudregundi village.This is the biggest crisis that the twoand-a-half-year-old Siddaramaiah government has faced, particularly because the chief minister hails from Mandya’s neighbouring district of Mysuru.The farmers of Mandya owe banks Rs 1,200 crore in loans taken over the past year. They owe private moneylenders, at a guesstimate, twice that. But they don’t want loan waivers or doles from the government. They want action on the sugar factories that had promised to crush their crop and pay for it, but are not doing it.“Just crush our crop and give us a fair price and we will do all the rest,” said Chikkanna in Saadholalu village. “My father had debts, I have debts. Even if we work for the next 10 generations, we are never going to get out of debt, as the prices we get for our crop will never keep up with the expenses.”The government, including the district administration, appears clueless. Chief minister Siddaramaiah and agriculture minister Krishna Byre Gowda have gone on record that they are “puzzled” about the spate of suicides.“I have visited them, but I personally feel uneasy to get publicity over such an issue. The government is doing all that it can to deal with the situation,” Gowda told ET Magazine in response to the criticism that neither the CM nor ministers have even visited families of the farmers who killed themselves.About a month back, to pay up the dues, Siddaramaiah ordered seizure of sugar stocks — for the first time in the country — from sugar factories, most of which are run by politicians across parties; this was just before the first suicide in Mandya. Further, the government, without waiting for the sale of this stock, has released demand drafts from the state treasury to the deputy commissioners of districts, to be directly credited to the accounts of farmers.But none of it seems to have worked on the ground. “What seizure? Where is the money? We haven’t seen it. Siddaramaiah is the son of a farmer. Why did he not anticipate this situation and prevent it,” asks Diwakar at Sollepura. He adds, even more bitterly: “Which factory is running under a loss? Have you heard of any sugar factory owner committing suicide?”As recently as Thursday, Paape Gowda, a farmer from Sallepur, consumed poison and died. District officials, off the record , say that the failure is theirs. They admit that information about the sugar glut in the international market should have been given to the farmers and they should have been prevented from growing the crop this year.“Now, when we go tell them to plant other crops and tide over this year’s situation, they point to the standing sugarcane crop and ask us, with great sarcasm, what do you want us to do with that?” a district official says. Sugar minister HS Mahadeva Prasad has promised that the sugar factories will open by the first week of August and start crushing the standing crop. He knows the situation is not rosy for the government either as there is no real way of recovering the amount that is actually due to farmers.He says: “We already have 30 lakh tonnes of stock in the godowns. This year, we will have 50 lakh tonnes of sugar and there is no market for it.We are hoping for a bailout from the Centre also, as we cannot let the farmers down.”Such government action, however, appears to be rather late. “They wait for us to die to give compensation. Why can’t they give it to us now, against the crop that has dried up and save our lives,” asks Channe Gowda of Kaagenahalli, to which no one seems to have an answer.The farmers in the irrigated region of Mandya are in every kind of possible debt, not just for agriculture, but to support an affluent lifestyle that they have all got used to. Every household has bikes, several have cars and almost everyone has tractors. Every festival, wedding and old-time small ceremonies are lavishly celebrated and each one is out to out do the neighbour’s expense.They managed all these years due to good returns on sugarcane crop. But now the yield is coming down due to excessive use of manure, unscientific cropping patterns and pure greed: farmers grow way more sugarcane than the amount the sugar factory is committed to buy and pass off yield from two acres as that from one, to make more money, say district officials.Every government in the state has fixed high prices for each tonne of sugarcane, making the farmer’s life more easy — until this year, when sugar factories have declined to open shop, as there is no market for even the committed cane.Farmers, however, need more money than ever, now, for the profile of the region has changed in the last decade. Every household has at least two to three people who are educated up to the pre-university or degree level.Aspirations have gone up and people like Kariputte Gowda of Panakanahalli need money to send their children to engineering and medical colleges. They send their children to private schools, shunning the government schools, which are free and give everything from food, to uniforms, to shoes, to school books.So every farmer has multiple debts. Other than loans that he or she has taken from the cooperative banks, the nationalised banks, the grameen banks and commercialised banks — almost all with gold jewellery as collateral — they are in the grip of moneylenders of all sorts.There are the traditional moneylenders, who lend money to villagers as their main occupation. They charge between 60% and 120% annual interest, against the 4% and the compounded 14% charged by the nationalised and nil interest by cooperative banks. Then there are the government employees and school teachers, who give loans as a side-business and charge an annual interest of 24%.There are also “sanghas” or associations of people from nearby cities and towns, who go into the village and give out loans to groups of five people. If one person defaults on the loan, all the rest have to cough up the money — at 24% interest. There is also the dreaded ‘meter baddi’ (meter interest) where each month of delay increases both the principal amount and the interest on it.Honour-bound to Repay“We have debt upon debt from all of them. No bank will give us loans this year, as we didn’t repay last year’s loans. We need the moneylenders for our day-to-day needs now,” says a defeated-looking Ramalingu, a farmer in his early 20s, in Kaagenahalli.The illegal moneylenders use a local code of dignity, prestige and pride of the village to get their money back. They don’t have to employ goons or use violence to recover the money.They just wait outside the homes of the defaulters, holding their accounts books in the evenings and in full sight of other villagers.“We are honour-bound to repay them and many of us have died because we couldn’t face the humiliation of owing money to them,” said P K Narayana Gowda, also of Panakanahalli, which saw the suicide of a 35-year-old farmer, Mahesh , on June 30.Siddaramaiah has ordered a crackdown on these moneylenders and about 500 people have been arrested so far. Farmer activists like Chukki Nanjundaswamy appreciate this move, but most villages are unhappy and refuse to divulge details of moneylenders, as they see it as the drying up of their last source of money.“They helped us in our time of need. We can’t betray them. They are only doing their business. Even my cousin has been arrested by the government for lending money. So, where are we to go next, when we have a need,” asks Kariputte Gowda. That’s a query neither the government nor the religious leaders advising the villagers against suicide have any answers to.