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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In this Bundelkhand Village, a Cry for Food, not Development -Neha Dixit

In this Bundelkhand Village, a Cry for Food, not Development -Neha Dixit

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published Published on Feb 24, 2017   modified Modified on Feb 24, 2017
-TheWire.in

Farmer suicides and hunger deaths plague flagship village of SP government.

“Have you heard of kangaali mein aata geela? That is our situation,”says Sugha Singh as he sits outside Balwan Singh’s house along with other village men under the tree on a warm February afternoon. He is referring to an old Hindi idiom which means getting into more hardships one after another. They are mourning the death of Munni Devi, 78, who died on the first death anniversary of her son, Balwan Singh. Last year, on the same day, he committed suicide after he came back from his fields. His gram harvest was half of what he had expected. He was slated to pay Rs five lakh loan-Rs 2.5 lakh for the tractor and Rs 2.5 lakh for the farmers’s credit card from the bank. His fourth of the six daughters was to get married next month and there was no money. He came home and consumed pesticide.

Occasions of mourning are not rare in Bilharka village. It is situated in the Naraini block of Banda district in Uttar Pradesh. It is one of the last villages on the UP-MP border, with a population of 3,000 people. The primary crops grown in this belt are pulses, gram, rice, wheat and peas. The village has five Brahmin houses, 100 Thakur houses, roughly 100 that belong to Jatavs, and the rest of them are equally divided among other backward castes like Kevats, Pals, Dhobis and others. Situated in far away rocky terrains, accessing the village is a colossal task which involves driving over 12 km on an intermittent narrow mud path. In 2012, it was chosen as one of the 10,000 villages under the Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Samagra Gram Vikas Scheme, the flagship scheme of the Samajwadi Party government to ensure basic amenities in the most backward villages of the state. This includes infrastructure development such as link roads, rural electrification, availability of potable water, sanitary toilets and a total of 33 infrastructure and beneficiary oriented programmes. Traces of these promises or their implementation are hard to find here.

In these last five years, twelve farmers have committed suicide–but that is only one of the problems. Narain, a fifty year old farmer says, “There has not been any crop yield in the last four years. This is the reason why we have to take a loan of at least Rs 50,000 for extra fertilisers to make the soil more fertile.” Puttilal, another farmer adds, “Roughly, the overall debt on the village is close to R 13 crore, an average of Rs 13 lakh per family.”

With such a high amount of debt and zero recovery, the villagers are more and more dependent on local moneylenders who charge an exponentially high rates of interest. Chatar Singh says, “Banks refuse us loan point blank. So we have no choice but to go to the sahukar who charges Rs five per Rs 100 as monthly interest, that too on mortgage. There is hardly anyone left who has any gold or silver left in their houses.” According to this calculation, they roughly pay 60 percent interest on the principal amount.

This explains the four suicides in the last one year.

“Migration is an all time high since that seems like the only option to escape hunger and poverty. Most of our boys first leave for Delhi. Once they reach there, the local brokers send them off to Pune, Gurgaon, Ludhiana, any place that gives them a job. But the money is not even enough for them sustain themselves, forget sending any money home. Coming back to the village pulls them into depression completely. ”

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 22 February, 2017, https://thewire.in/111194/bundelkhand-village-cry-food-not-development/


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