Filmmaker cries with Vidarbha farmers

Award-winning director Fred de Sam Lazaro's 'The Dying Fields' premieres on PBS and puts a human face on rural distress  

NEW YORK: India is stirring after many decades of torpor, but award-winning film-maker Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on cotton farmers in Vidarbha who have been left behind by India's economic miracle. "India is a dynamic place and you have butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. The money lenders are doing gangbusters, which is the wrinkle part of the story. What we are trying to do here is tell a very people story. The cotton farmers in Vidarbha really do not have what it takes to thrive in a globalised market," Lazaro told DNA.

Lazaro was born in India and migrated to the US as a teen in 1975. He observes it's becoming increasingly difficult to recognise many parts of India's urban landscape because it is growing at a breakneck speed. But his film, The Dying Fields which premiers this week on America's respected PBS channel as part of the Wide Angle series is intended for an audience that never gets to see rural India.

Burdened by crop failures and unmanageable debts there have been more than 624 suicides this year in Maharashtra, adding to the l,354 suicides reported in Vidarbha last year. Lazaro says it is interesting to compare the transformation of the Indian economy with what happened in the US during the 1980s where there was a massive transformation of its farm economy. 

"So many farmers went out of business, so many farmers found themselves terribly indebted and so many farmers indeed in Minnesota and Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, committed suicide as well. That's happening in India on an Indian scale," says Lazaro. 

"A lot of the farmers who are killing themselves are not people who have lost everything. They are people who have something but are losing it. They are humiliated socially. That is why they are committing suicide. That is something that killed a number of farmers in the US. But of course, in a wealthy country you have systems that provide a safety net. There is crop insurance. If you just squeal loud enough you will get government assistance. Farmers in India cannot squeal loud enough to get government attention and it is not clear what the government can do."

The problem of farmer suicides have dogged Manmohan Singh's administration which is battling to ensure India's economic boom becomes more broad-based. He toured Vidarbha last year to assure farmers that their need for a fairer system of farm credit would be addressed and announced a relief of Rs 3,750 crore. India's 650-million agricultural population is still largely shut out from the economy's technology-driven growth.