By Jaideep Hardikar
Digambar Rathod with his mother, Sunita, elder sister Roshni (in yellow), and younger siblings Saroj and Mahesh (right foreground). His father committed suicide on Jan. 1.
Credit:Jaideep Hardikar/IPS
YAVATMAL, India, Jun 10 (IPS) – Eleven-year-old Digambar Rathod looks older than his age. Shy and uncertain, he stares disconcertedly at the garlanded photograph of his father Jaideep, a 42-year-old cotton farmer who committed suicide on Jan. 1, 2009 in Tiwsala village, in eastern Maharashtra state’s suicide-torn Yavatmal district.
As the new head of the household, the boy-turned-farmer has adult responsibilities like the repayment of a bank loan of 190,000 rupees (roughly 3,960 dollars) that was the cause of his father’s death.
Digambar has dropped out of school, says his mother, Sunita, grief-stricken and burdened by the terrible tragedy the family has suffered. His older sister Roshni too has left school to take over the household work. The two younger children, a boy and a girl, are too young to work, says Roshni.
But everyone knows that it won’t be long before all four Rathod children join the ranks of Vidarbha’s baccha-kisans (child farmers). Here in six districts including Yavatmal, Wardha and Akola, thousands of cotton farmers have taken their lives due to mounting debts and a dramatic decline in farm incomes over the past decade or so, and their children have stepped into their shoes.
According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), 40,000 of the 184,000 farmers’ suicides reported in India between 1995 and 2007 were from Maharashtra. Over 25,000 of the deaths in the state were registered after 2002.
Ganesh Diliprao Kale in Ralegaon village, Yavatmal, was barely 13 when he became the eldest male in both his own and his two uncles’ families. Over a span of five years, between 2003 and 2008, his father’s brothers and father were driven by debt to suicide.
“Ganesh cultivated our farm last season with little support from relatives,” says his mother Shalini. Her school-going daughter, Ashwini, 11, assists them on the weekends. She’s already taken over much of her mother’s work in the house.
A few miles away, in Khadakdoh village, in south Yavatmal, Kavita Kudmethe and her two daughters, around 13 years of age, scrape a living as farm workers. Her husband killed himself in 2007, and his parents threw Kavita and her daughters out of the house.
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Daughter as ‘Burden’
In November 2005, a 17-year-old schoolgirl from an impoverished farm household in Aasra village, Maharashtra state, committed suicide.
“If I don’t my farmer father will (take his life),” Neeta Pudalikrao Bhopat wrote in her dying note. “My family can’t make 1,000 rupees (roughly 20 dollars) a month. I have two younger sisters. My parents can’t bear the burden of our marriages when we don’t have enough to eat. So, I am ending my life.”
The inability to meet dowry demands is one of the many factors driving poor farmers to suicide, a study commissioned by Government of Maharashtra found in 2005.
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