Vidarbha’s woes continue: 24 farmers from the region and eight elsewhere in Maharashtra have ended their lives, unable to repay loans they had taken
In Vidarbha, nothing much has changed
MUMBAI: Vidarbha’s woes continue: 24 farmers from the region and eight elsewhere in Maharashtra have ended their lives, unable to repay loans they had taken, since February 29.
Why has this happened? Are those who killed themselves farmers who found they would not benefit from the Rs60,000-crore loan waiver scheme?
Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is on record that Maharashtra’s farmers will get Rs10,100 crore of the Rs60,000-crore package.
Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray says: “Farmers’ suicides are on even after the loan waiver because they have realised that they have been cheated. A farmer in western Maharashtra has got loan waiver to the tune of several lakhs while his counterpart from Vidarbha can’t get his loan worth Rs75,000 waived. This is ridiculous.”
Maharashtra has seen several relief packages for farmers in recent years.
On July 10, 2005, chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, acknowledging that nearly 1,000 farmers had committed suicide in one year, announced a package worth Rs1,075 crore and loan waiver up to Rs 25,000 for marginal farmers. Another package worth Rs3,750 crore was announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 15, 2006, after the agrarian distress in Vidarbha made headlines.
But the farmers hardly got any benefit, says Kishor Tiwari, president of the Vidarbha Janandolan Samiti. “The quality seed replacement programme from the PM’s package is a classic example of how the funds actually went to seed companies, pipe and pump manufacturers and cooperative banks and not the farmers,” he told DNA.
“All the seeds were rotten. Pipes and pumps supplied through government agencies at subsidised rates were available at much lower rates in the open market. So, farmers were not benefited by the earlier two packages and even this is not likely to help,” he said.
Adds Thackeray, “The money meant to implement two packages for the farmers did not reach them. There were a lot of complaints of about the manner in which those packages were implemented. In fact, there was no monitoring authority keeping eye on disbursal of money.”
The National Bureau of Crime Records (NBCR) says that from January 1999 to December 2006 as many as 1,62,000 farmers in the country ended their lives.
Provisional data made available by the NBCR shows that approximately 40,000 more farmers have been added to this list by December 2007. And Maharashtra tops the list.
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