Suicides, drought plague ‘angriest’ state in India

Bloomberg

In India’s richest state, Maruti Bhosle roamed the parched fields surrounding his one-room tin hut before taking his life. The farmer left behind a wife, a daughter and $2,160 rupees
of debt borrowed at a 60 percent interest rate.
The story is eerily repeated in many villages in Beed district, which sits a few hours’ drive from India’s financial capital Mumbai in Maharashtra state. A three-year drought has left farmers like Bhosle with no income to pay back loans, with tragic consequences: Beed reportedly has the state’s highest rate of farmer suicides.
The deaths, exacerbated by a lack of job opportunities, may pose a challenge for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempt to repeat his party’s performance in Maharashtra. In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s coalition won 42 of 48 seats, one of the largest number up for grabs in any state.
While Modi appears set to win another five-year term with a reduced majority when votes are counted on May 23, farmers remain a wild card.
“The key issues are jobs, housing, education for my daughter, women safety and drought,” said Bhosle’s widow, Mangal, adding that the family never made enough money cultivating cotton and soybeans because of the lack of water.
“Droughts are a recurring phenomenon. Whoever promises to fix this problem once and for all will get our vote.”
Large-scale farmer protests have popped up across India, with a contingent from Beed joining more than 50,000 who marched to capital New Delhi last November.
Mumbai has also seen thousands of farmers from Maharashtra jam up roads over the past few years to protest the Modi government’s farm policies.
Rising cost of fertilisers combined with depressed crop prices have left farmers with less money for living expenses and consumer goods across Asia’s third-largest economy. In an already arid eastern Maharashtra, a seemingly endless drought has led to rising indebtedness and crop failures.
As many as 12,602 farmers and agricultural labourers in India committed suicide in 2015, according to the last available data before the government stopped releasing figures.
Maharashtra, along with neighbouring Telangana and Karnataka, accounted for half of the deaths among India’s 29 states that year.
Modi’s BJP had earlier pledged to make Maharashtra drought free this year. The project called Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyaan accelerated the building of dams, ponds and tanks to store water. But many remain dry, prompting residents to look for other ways to get water.
The main opposition Congress party is appealing to those who feel left behind under PM Modi.
“We have an anger index that calculates a voter’s disillusionment against the current regime,” said Praveen Chakravarty, head of Congress’s data analytics department.