Unseasonal rains, hailstorms and fog late last year ravaged the cotton harvest and left the otherwise cotton-rich Vidarbha a wasteland. It also led about 20 farmers to the grave.

Steeped in debt and unable to repay heavy loans from both cooperative banks and private financiers, ranging between Rs 25,000 and Rs 40,000, plus interest amounting to about Rs 10,000, the farmers found death the only escape.

Though the authorities here deny that 40-year-old Sawant committed suicide due to the precarious situation here, president of the Shetkari Sanghatana's Parbhani unit, Govind Joshi says the death blow came on April 22, when two recovery officers of theDistrict Central Cooperative Bank confronted him at the weekly bazaar in Basmat tehsil.

Thrusting a notice in his hand in full view of the other farmers, the officers demanded that he immediately repay the Rs 25,000 borrowed from them in addition to Rs 16,000 as interest. If he failed to pay up, they warned, they would take possession of his property.

Shaken and depressed, Sawant returned to his home in Bhorib village, consumed insecticide and went to bed. When his wife tried to wake him in the evening, she found him dead.

With a wife and five children to feed and not a penny to his name, Sawant preferred suicide to watching his family die of starvation. The cotton harvest, on which he had pinned his hopes, was damaged due the unseasonal rain and fog and the recovery officers were hot on his trail.

Though the inclement weather had not wreaked destruction of the kind witnessed in Vidarbha, farmers in most villages in Parbhani district in Marathwada are reeling under heavy debts.

Many of them whospoke to The Indian Express said the problem centers around loan recovery officers, who had recently stepped up their efforts.``We are witnessing the worst ever crisis and unless the loans are waived there will be more suicides,'' warns Govind Joshi. In the wake of the Vidarbha suicides and those in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Chief Minister Manohar Joshi had recently assured Marathwada's farmers that intensive recovery drives by cooperative banks would cease. But nothing of that sort has happened.