Archives

MANDYA, India, Thursday (AFP) Even as world trade ministers meet in Mexico to push ahead trade liberalisation talks and debate farm subsidies, debt-ridden Indian farmers are taking their own lives rather than face harassment by moneylenders.

More than 90 farmers, hit hard by a second year of drought, have committed suicide in the last month alone in the southern state of Karnataka - 21 of them from Mandya district, 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of state capital Bangalore, India's technology and aviation hub.

Mallikarjun Kharge, the state's home minister and chief of a committee on drought management, said at the weekend that a study of suicides in the past seven years showed that between 600 and 680 farmers kill themselves in Karnataka annually.

In Mandya's Maddur region, 24-year-old farmer K.N. Ramesh hanged himself last month after he was unable to repay an 80,000-rupee (1,739-dollar) loan. Another farmer in a village close-by gulped down pesticides to end his life.

"In the last two years all the crops have dried up," said Ninge Gowda, father of Ramesh. "He was looking after the sugarcane fields and borrowed money for which the interest accumulated.

Gowda, in his late fifties, has had to turn his attention from his family's one-acre plot to toil as a labourer on other people's farms to keep himself alive.

The farmers plant sugarcane, red millet, rice and mulberries using funds borrowed from national banks, cooperatives or moneylenders. Other loans pay for fertiliser, bore wells and dowries for their daughters.

Moneylenders are the favoured source of funds for illiterate farmers lured by the monthly five-percent interest charges, while in neighbouring Chanapatna, pawnbrokers do brisk business from farmers handing over jewellery and watches in return for cash. The Karnataka government has announced a relief package of 8.5 billion rupees and passed an ordinance this week to keep steep interest rates in check.

Moneylenders are not allowed to act against farmers' debts for one year, and risk up to three years in jail and 30,000 rupees in fines for violating the law.

Seventy percent of India's one billion people depend on agriculture. The country leads a coalition of developing nations at the WTO meeting in Cancun this week in a battle to push rich nations to slash their subsidies and ensure tariff protection for developing-world farmers.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries

Produced by Lake House
Copyright © 2003 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager