As another election approaches Bothbodan village near Yavatmal tries to confront its own grim future. Two elections have gone by after Vinod Rathod, a cotton farmer in the village committed suicide on January 25, 2003.
It was one of the first farmer suicides in the region that sparked off a fate of such suicides which have continued to shock the country and reflects the sorry state of cotton farmers in Maharashtra. It was indication that mostly cotton farmers in the Vidharbha region are living on the edge. One bad harvest and they would tip over with no chance of paying back accumulated loans and the loan sharks moving in .
As many as 3,146 farmers have committed suicide in 2013 in the state and since 1995, 60,000 have ended their lives in the state unable to pay back loans. More than ten years later, Vinod's widow Bebi Vinod Rathod says that the situation is as grim. Bothbodan, 12 km from Yavatmal and 160 km from Nagpur, has seen a procession of VIPs and they all left behind promises.
The story of Vinod Rathods' family is the story of every farmers family. According to Bebi Rathod, it was the loan for the eldest daughter's wedding coupled with lack of irrigation facility that resulted in a bad harvest. After her husband killed himself unable to replay the loans he had taken, the government had given her Rs one lakh , "but I could just repay the loan and then had two daughters to marry," she says. Both her sons are working as farm labourers and the family finds it difficult to make ends meet.
Her son Rajkumar had to leave school. "What is the use of education when we do not get jobs. They ask for a bribe and loot us everywhere. They neither give us water, nor jobs and bank officers haunt us for recovery," says her nephew Swagat.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi visited the village and like many other VIPs assured them of all help. But his promise remained just that: words: "Nothing moved," says Bebi Vinod Rathod.
For the villagers the visit of VIPs has become a regular ritual. They come and go but the misery of Bothbodan village continues. Now the villagers mostly scoff at such visitors. For them elections are meaningless. Like VIP visitors they just come and go.
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