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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | With No Water and Many Loans, Farmers' Deaths Are Rising in Tamil Nadu -Jaideep Hardikar

With No Water and Many Loans, Farmers' Deaths Are Rising in Tamil Nadu -Jaideep Hardikar

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published Published on Jun 22, 2017   modified Modified on Jun 22, 2017
-TheWire.in

While suicides and shock deaths have seen a sudden spike in Tamil Nadu’s Cauvery delta region, the government does not believe the drought is the cause and is continuing to direct water away from rural areas.

From the banks of the Kollidam river, S. Selvaraju’s farm is barely a mile away.

The huge river, actually a tributary of the Cauvery that drains its surplus water into the sea, runs along the village of Anaikudy, 40 km from Thanjavur in the heart of Tamil Nadu’s Cauvery delta.

For centuries, people here have cultivated three crops every year – paddy, millets, then paddy again. Over the last few years, though, several farmers have switched to cultivating sugarcane for a state-run sugar mill nearby. Some have raised banana plantations too. New cash crops partially replaced the old paddy system.

Water – even if the rains weren’t good that year – never seemed to be a problem. Until suddenly it was.

Selvaraju took his own life, hanging himself from a tree on his farm, after his old borewell ran dry after serving him for two decades. The new one that he commissioned just a month earlier also bore no water.

The 65-year-old, who owned a seven-acre farm, committed suicide on May 5, leaving behind unpaid debts and a family – a wife and three sons – with many questions. Could he not have waited for a few more months for the rains? What was the need to kill himself?

Water, says Selvaraju’s son Karti, has suddenly become a luxury in and around the village.

As his family struggles to come to terms with his father’s suicide, Karti says, “I had heard of farmers committing suicides in different parts of the country, but never thought this will happen to us.”

In Kadamankudy village of Nagapattinam district, at the far-eastern tip of the Cauvery delta, a similar story unfolds.

He wasn’t the right age to suffer a heart attack. Veermani was 35 when he passed away on December 30, 2016.

“We were on the field; he just collapsed and died,” his widow Kavitha tells us at her small thatched hut, wondering how her husband could die at such a young age. He was fit and fine, she says, but under a lot of stress. Nothing was left on the farm – it wore a forlorn look, she says. The couple went to their farm – a 1.25-acre plot that this landless Dalit family leased for the first time from a fellow villager – to tend to the crop, or whatever was left of it. Around 4 pm, from some distance, she saw him falling.

“When I rushed to check what the matter was, he was not responding,” she says. She called for help and took him to the nearby cottage hospital in an ambulance. He was no more, the doctors told her.

It was, doctors told Kavitha, a shock death – something she hasn’t been able to fathom even today.

“It did not rain this year; it was our bad luck,” she says. “It was the first year we decided to lease land and it turned out to be the worst year for farming.”

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 21 June, 2017, https://thewire.in/149054/drought-tamil-nadu-farmers-deaths/


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