Overwhelming debt drives Indian farmers to suicide

KOCHI, India — On the last night of his life, the farmer walked into his dusty fields, choked down pesticide and waited to die.

He owed more than $1,000 to banks and moneylenders, and he had told his wife if the cotton harvest was bad this year he would kill himself.

Pandurang Chindu Surpam left the near-barren fields he worked with his sons to share a last meal with his family. Hours later, he died. He was 45.

Crushed by debts most Westerners would deem inconsequential, farmers like Surpam killed themselves at a rate of 48 a day between 2002 and 2006 — more than 17,500 a year, according to experts who have analyzed government statistics. At least 160,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997, said K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies.

The epidemic dates to the 1990s and is generally attributed to a toxic blend of slashed subsidies, tougher global competition, drought, predatory moneylenders and expensive genetically modified seeds.

"It's one of the largest public-health disasters to hit India since independence," said professor Charles Nuckols of Brigham Young University, an anthropologist who has studied Indian village life for decades.

In northern India, authorities have gone so far as to ban a type of cheap hair dye because it was being drunk to induce death by kidney failure.

But it is India's cotton belt, a land of searing temperatures and backbreaking work, that has been hit hardest.

In rural Maharashtra state, farmers say things have never been harder. Owing more than they earn, these steadiest of workers have become gamblers of the highest stakes, betting their land — and their lives — on one more good crop.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has visited some of the widows, and the 2008 budget offers some debt relief.

But the farmers say their plight is largely being ignored as the country rushes to embrace the global marketplace. Few find it reassuring that India's agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, doubles as the nation's top cricket official.

A decade ago, the government began cutting farm subsidies as it liberalized the managed socialist economy. The farmers' costs rose as the tariffs that had protected their products were lowered.

"Suicide is one of the symptoms of the larger agrarian crisis," said Srijit Mishra of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research.

Meanwhile, banking reforms forced farmers to be more dependent on private moneylenders. These generally allow the farmers only 11 months to pay back their loans at interest rates of more than 100 percent a year, or else they seize the land at a drastically reduced rate.

"It's not a nice business," one village moneylender said. "But you earn a lot of money."

The man runs a small grocery store and has made hundreds of loans to farmers. He also has seized some 125 acres in his decadeslong career, which he took over from his father.

He said the number of farmers unable to repay their loans has increased roughly 30 percent in the last 10 years.

Farmers and analysts say another blow was the introduction of genetically modified cotton seeds, notably St. Louis-based Monsanto's "Bt" seeds, which are resistant to boll worms.

The seeds can be more productive and have become standard in much of Maharashtra but can be three times more expensive to maintain than traditional seeds.

For the widows, left to tend the crops and raise the children, the suicides are personal calamities with roots not in macroeconomics, but in homegrown problems — impossible debts, the loss of ancestral land, rapacious money lenders.

Surpam's widow, a stoic mother of three, blames her husband's suicide on the loans he had taken over the past two years, his first taste of debt.

He borrowed $625 from a bank and $500 from private moneylenders to invest in his fields and pay for his daughter's wedding, she said.

"He used to say we owe money and if anyone comes looking for us, it would be a dishonor," said Surpam's widow, Sumitra, who learned only after his death April 1 how much he owed.

Surpam's 3 acres produced just $150 worth of cotton this year, not nearly enough to keep the moneylender at bay.

The suicide, his widow said, "was obviously because of the loan."