Gujarat: 'We will all die of hunger'

Seventy-year-old Hadhabhai Ahir can barely walk. He slowly shuffles into his home in Viramdad village in Jamnagar district and brings out a huge sheaf of bills and a bank book to show the debt build-up and why his son Devayar took his own life. “I try to help out in the fields with my other two sons but we have divided the land so I have to do the work of the son who died.”

Devayar Hadhabhai Dangar Ahir died in April 2009 after consuming poison tablets. His wife, Jasuben, says he seemed depressed as their loan amount had gone up to Rs.70,000. They own two hectares of land, which produced good cotton. However, untimely rains for two consecutive years had ruined the crop. The costs had mounted and Devayar did not have any other means to pay back the loan. He ended his life, leaving a 26-year-old wife, a two-month-old boy and a six-year-old girl to fend for themselves.

“No one has come to help us even though the police report said death due to crop failure. We still have loans. We don’t know what to do or how to claim anything. There is no one to help us. Not even the politicians came here, even during election time,” says Jasuben. “It is like we don’t exist.” She says, “I can never remarry. My children will not know a father and I will eventually also have to look after my in-laws. Unless the land yields something next year, we will all die of hunger.”



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Driving past one massive industrial unit after another on Gujarat’s superfast highways in Saurashtra, it is hard to imagine that just a few kilometres off those roads lie villages ravaged by drought and untouched by development.

The situation this year is bleaker than before. Saurashtra appears to be on the brink of a massive agrarian crisis, which from all accounts can only be addressed by the state. With the cotton crop failing owing to the lack of timely rains, farmers, steeped in debt and seeing no hope of relief, are ending their lives in tragic ways. Chief Minister Narendra Modi had some years ago declared that there were no suicides by farmers in Gujarat. To test the veracity of this statement, a team of activists filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act on farmers’ deaths. The official data revealed an explosive situation.

From 2003 to 2007, there were 489 instances of suicide by farmers in Gujarat. While the reasons for their deaths were not given, it is understood that most of them were due to the victims’ inability to repay their debts. More official data, released following another RTI application last year, reveal that there were 112 deaths from 2008 to 2012. Around 40 more farmers died in 2012 between August and December, according to other sources verified by police reports.

‘Progressive’ image

An informed source points out that the police have not recorded the deaths accurately and the numbers are believed to be much higher. “Typical of autocratic governments, the police and the administration are told to suppress the data or not record them at all,” the source said. “The Gujarat government is notorious for not revealing the truth because of the need to preserve its ‘progressive’ image.”

Gujarat has been trying hard to project itself as a State that is much ahead of others in development and industrialisation. Modi’s “Vikas Yatras” have become well known. The large number of suicides, however, fly in the face of his claims and, in fact, indicate that development in the State is clearly not balanced and definitely not in favour of the poor farmer. In fact, experts say investment in agriculture has been compromised in an effort to favour industry.

This year in the Saurashtra belt, close to 35 lakh hectares of cotton crop has been damaged. Almost 80 per cent of the region’s population is dependent on agriculture and almost every marginal or small farmer has been affected. Yet, experts say, the government appears focussed only on wooing investment from big industrialists, as was seen in the Vibrant Gujarat show held in January. Frontline visited the districts of Rajkot, Jamnagar and Amreli in the Saurashtra region where the harvest, which takes place from November to March/April, has been miserable and distress is beginning to take its toll. In fact, the largest number of suicides by farmers (40, as mentioned above) were recorded after the rains.

The events leading up to these suicides are distressingly similar. Often ultimatums and a barrage of notices from banks prove to be the tipping point for the victims. Banks threaten to repossess their land if the loans are not paid back. Inevitably, it gets too much for the farmer and he ends his life by consuming poison. Sadly, the loan amounts are low, some as low as Rs.10,000. It is a shame that drastic measures such as suicide are needed to get the government’s attention.

Unfortunately, it has been proved in other such farming crises that death hardly solves any problems—in fact, it only makes the situation worse. For families stuck with unpaid loans, having no means to pay them back and with absolutely no relief coming from the State government, it is a tragically hopeless situation. Some of the women Frontline spoke to did not have a clue as to where even to seek relief. Even where the sarpanch was knowledgeable, he or she did not have the resources to help the family out.

Problems may worsen

The crops grown in this belt are largely cotton and groundnut, both of which have failed owing to the scanty rainfall in August last year. As April approaches, it is expected that the crisis will deepen as this is the month the loans have to be repaid.

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