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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The silent sufferers: on Maharashtra farmer suicides -Jyoti Shelar

The silent sufferers: on Maharashtra farmer suicides -Jyoti Shelar

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published Published on Feb 20, 2018   modified Modified on Feb 20, 2018
-The Hindu

The children of the farmers who committed suicide do not receive the support or counselling they need to recover from the resulting mental trauma. Jyoti Shelar visits the villages in Maharashtra worst affected by farmer suicide and reports on these minors’ struggle to get their lives back on track

“Every time I open the door, I see my father’s body,” says 14-year-old Nikita Surwase, pointing at the iron shaft on the ceiling.

In May 2014, Nikita’s father, Ashok, hanged himself to escape the mounting pressure of repaying a loan of nearly ?2 lakh that he had taken to grow cotton on his 1.5-acre land in Talegaon village, Beed district, Maharashtra. That day, Nikita says, she and her father were home while her mother Sunita (30), grandmother Jaibai (65), and three younger siblings — Ashwini (12), Rohan (9) and Suraj (6) — had gone to visit a relative.

Around four in the afternoon, her father asked her to go out and clean the porch. The unsuspecting child, who was 10 at the time, followed his order.

Her mother returned around five and found the door locked from the inside. There was no response to their repeated knocking. A neighbour who was passing by noticed the commotion. He peeped in from the window and saw Ashok’s body hanging lifeless. Everyone rushed to break open the door. Nikita’s father had cut a hammock that used to hang from the ceiling and used the same rope to end his life.
 
‘I feel very tense’

“Pappa gelya paasun mala khup tension yeta, radu yeta” (I feel very tense since my father passed away, I feel like crying all the time), says Nikita. She uses the word ‘tension’ multiple times during the conversation, unable to articulate more exactly what she feels.

For the first few months, her weeping was seen as the natural reaction of a grief-stricken child. “All of us were crying,” says her grandmother, Jaibai. But Nikita failed to return to a semblance of her normal self. She stopped communicating and almost gave up eating. She spoke only a few words throughout the day and slept all the time.

“When we would call her for meals, she would eat very little and go back to sleep,” says Jaibai. “She didn’t want to go to school any more. She kept saying she had a headache.” In the following months, Nikita lost weight rapidly. She had fever often. Her crying wouldn’t abate, and she kept having graphic flashbacks of her father’s lifeless body.

Nikita’s father could not repay the loan as Maharashtra had one of its worst spells of drought that year, and it ruined his crop yield. To continue repaying the loan, Nikita’s mother took charge of the farm and also started working in other farms, plucking cotton.

Two of Nikita’s siblings, Ashwini and Rohan, were sent away to Aurangabad to stay at a residential school that adopted the children of farmers who had killed themselves. Nikita, who is now in class nine, continued to battle against her anxieties, her trauma getting little attention from her family.

Last year, an Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) who lived nearby took Nikita to the Beed Civil Hospital, where she was diagnosed with extremely low levels of haemoglobin. She was given three units of blood and prescribed several food supplements. Nikita still weighs only 30 kg, way below what’s healthy for a 14-year-old. Though she looks slightly better now, the ASHA worker says that the girl is lost in her own world.

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The Hindu, 17 February, 2018, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-silent-sufferers-on-farmer-suicides-in-maharashtra/article22777408.ece


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