WARANGAL, Jan 18: Papamma, the 25-year-old wife of farmer Samala Mallaiah, 35, comes home around midday on December 21 to prepare food for her husband. As she steps into the mud hut, she finds Mallaiah lying dead on the floor, an empty bottle of pesticide in his right hand.His mother and three young sons, aged between nine and four, begin a chorus of wailing that brings neighbours running to the hut. Mallaiah leaves behind a debt of Rs 70,000. The place: Nagaram village of Parkal mandal, about 20 km from this Telengana town.
* 25-year-old Nellutla Ravi, another farm hand, kills himself by consuming Mono-crocophos on December 16, while his wife, mother, one-year-old daughter and brother sleep in the same hut. Ravi leaves behind a legacy of unpaid loans worth Rs 95,000. The place: Kamaram village in Atmakur mandal, not very far from Parkal.
* Early this week, a team of Government officials go round these and other adjoining villages where several more farmers committed suicide over the past few weeks.
Stalking the team is a suspicious-looking man. Confronted by Warrangal District Collector Shalini Mishra, the man says he is a moneylender who lent a total of Rs 4 crore to cotton farmers in the area and was now at a loss about how to recover the loans from his creditors who killed themselves.
He is following the officials because the Government has decided to disburse Rs 1 lakh to the family of each of the victims and he thus hopes to swoop on the money before it is late.
Sure enough, when Papamma got Rs 25,000 in cash as compensation, her husband's creditor took away Rs 20,000 the same day. The officials deposited the remaining Rs 75,000 in banks in the names of her three sons. ``They are after me all the time,'' says Butchaiah, Ravi's brother, who is trying to sell off part of his land but not getting any buyer. He also faces another problem: What will the family survive on if he sells his land away? ``Maybe some day he too will commit suicide. There is no other escape,'' remarks an elderly neighbour,
wryly.
It has actually proved so for 29 farmers in this district -- they have escaped their creditors by killing themselves. And the suicide saga goes on despite promises by the Government and in some cases even payment of compensation.
Nearly a month-and-a-half after the first suicides were reported and three weeks after Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu visited some of the grieving families in Warrangal on December 24, the death march is on, not just in this district but also in Karimnagar, Mehboobnagar, Medak and Guntur.
The tally keeps rising -- 54 in the State till the end of last week. And this despite a call to the farmers by the outlawed Peoples War Group, which runs a parallel Government in large parts of Warrangal and other parts of Telengana, not to commit suicide.
The pest -- spodopetra -- which ravaged the cotton crop leading to the suicides was the last, if also the bitterest, scourge. But so much was going woefully wrong long before the pests devastated the cotton foliage and with it,
the farmer's last hope.
The victims, all of them marginal farmers, obviously found it a hopeless situation. Life in this arid region is difficult in the best of times. But this season has been the cruelest and not just for the cotton farmers.
The horizon started darkening last July-August when an unusually low rainfall dashed hopes of a good paddy crop. ``For nearly 85,000 hectares the paddy could not be planted at all. That was the beginning,'' says L Jalapathi Rao, senior agronomist.
Then came the unseasonal rain in October, followed by the pest attack which took on epidemic proportions. Other crops like pulses, sunflower and groundnut were quickly eaten up by swarming insects. Unknown to attack the cotton crop in a big way, the pests did not deter the farmer from actually increasing the cotton cultivation area. But the marauders on their fields proved treacherous too -- the pests lay underground during daytime and attacked the crop at nightfall. ``We fought hard, digging up the pests day and night,
but in vain,'' says Bhadraiah of Nagaram, whose three acres yielded only nine quintals of cotton, against an expected 30 quintals.
If it was the poor farmer's saddest moment, it was the happiest for the pesticide dealers, their agents and, of course, the ubiquitous moneylenders who too swarmed the area. Money and pesticides flowed again, but the desperate farmer put the chemicals to the tragic use. It is a grim story of how the sharks caught the hapless men in their jaws.
Naidu seeks Central aid
To provide immediate relief to beleaguered cotton farmers in the State, the Government has asked the Centre for an assistance of Rs 70 crore, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said in Hyderabad today. This is besides the Rs 40 crore released by the State Government already. Naidu told mediapersons that he had asked Chief Election Commissioner MS Gill yesterday to permit the Governments to take up relief operations for farmers.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
