Trigger warning: the following article contains references to suicides; please avoid reading if you are disturbed by the subject.
Archana Chinchore’s face is a picture of exhaustion. She sits quietly on a plastic chair in the centre of her modest kitchen in the family home at Bhadra of Loha Taluka, Nanded district of drought-stricken Marathwada region in Maharashtra. Her shoulders are slumped and her head dropped low, as she avoids meeting anyone’s gaze. Her voice is barely above a whisper, soft and fragile, as if it might break under the weight of her grief.
Once a mother who juggled household chores with caring for her four-year-old son, Archana, 30, now struggles to get through the day. Her life forever changed on August 6 — the day her husband, Hausaji, 32, a debt-ridden farmer, died by suicide. “Around 5.30 a.m., he kissed our son, who was fast asleep and left to milk the buffaloes. It was just like any other day,” Archana recounts, tears streaming down her face. “But this time, he never came back.”
At Gidhada of Paithan Taluka, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Sadhana Kalaskar, 45, lives in a house which resembles a cattle shed at first glance. Her husband Ashok,52, died by suicide in November.Photo Deshpande Abhinay | Photo Credit: Abhinay Deshpande
Their 10-acre agricultural fields, barely a kilometre from the house, became the site of his final moments. In December, the cotton and sugarcane fields are lush, a stark contrast to scenes from May and June, when the summer heat cracks the black soil. The lanes in the village are cement-concrete but they are narrow, and Archana’s house is reachable only by a two-wheeler.
As she wipes her tears with her pallu, their son, Gangadhar, tugs at her saree, demanding attention. Hausaji had been burdened by loans: ₹4 lakh from private financiers and another ₹1 lakh from a bank. Heavy showers had destroyed his soya bean and cotton crops, leaving him unable to repay his debts. The pressure, according to his grieving family, became unbearable, driving him to take his life. Now, the debts are carried forward to Archana.
Archana’s mother, Sagarbai, has moved in to help with chores and care for her grandson, and her in-laws go to work in the fields. “She doesn’t eat properly or talk to anyone,” says Sagarbai, her voice trembling. “She spends hours locked in a room, crying. So, I came here to help her and try to get things back on track. I know, the loss is irreversible, but she now has a son to take care of.”
Hausaji’s story is one of many. In Nanded district alone, 146 farmers ended their lives in 2024, contributing to the 822 farmer suicides recorded in the Marathwada region, between January and November, according to a report by the Divisional Commissioner’s office in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad).
Beed district in the Marathwada region, which has had drought for over 10 years now, has had with 160 deaths, followed by Nanded, Dharashiv (Osmanabad) with 143, and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar with 132. Jalna, Latur, Parbhani, and Hingoli reported 76, 72, 64, and 29 deaths by suicide, respectively. In 2023, 1,088 farmers ended their lives in eight districts of the region, says data from the Divisional Commissioner’s office. In 2022 Maharashtra recorded 38% of all suicides in the agricultural sector, the highest in India, going by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.
Archana Hausaji Chinchore from Bhadra of Loha Taluka, Nanded district sitting with her son. | Photo Credit: Abhinay Deshpande
Debt was the common thread tying all the victims together. For the survivors, the financial burden persists — now compounded by the anguish of loss and the social stigma that comes with a loved one’s suicide. Older children, especially girls, grow up fast, often dropping out of school to support mothers and younger siblings.
However, for Archana, who has grown up hearing about farmers taking their lives, the grim statistics mean little compared to the daily struggle of raising her son, who was recently enrolled in a government school. “He never told me about debt, thinking I was too sensitive. I have to start working. I am left to deal with everything on my own,” she says, adding that she does have the support of her family. Married in 2012, she remembers Hausaji as a quiet, responsible man who took charge of their family farm at a young age.
Cropping trouble
Senior journalist Himanshu Nitnaware, who reports on crises for Down To Earth magazine, says that currently farmers, especially small-scale cultivators, are compelled to resort to non-banking financial corporations (NBFCs) which does not allow them to come out of the vicious debt cycle. “Loans with low interest rates from government banks can prevent farmers from approaching private money lenders,” he says.
In Degaon, over 50 kilometres from Bhadra, Seema Jadhav, 32, is mourning her husband, Dinesh, 35, who died by suicide on December 13. A mother of three — two daughters and a son — Jadhav struggles to make sense of why her husband chose to take his life. On that morning, Dinesh left their home without a word. “It was unusual, but I thought he was just stressed and in a hurry, but when he didn’t return for lunch, I started to worry,” she recalls. By the evening, her fear turned into a reality. She says the bank had refused to grant him a fresh loan, as the previous loan was still reflected on documents. “But he had cleared this loan,” she adds.
Two days after her husband’s death, Seema’s over-a-century-old family home was filled with relatives and neighbours trying to console her and Dinesh’s parents. She sits on a plastic chair, her eyes vacant, trying to piece together her husband’s final thoughts. “He had been quiet these last few days. I know it was about getting the loan to clear a few ‘hand (emergency) loans’ and get a motor for the borewell, which was dug a few months ago. But he didn’t share the details. Maybe he didn’t want to worry me,” she says softly. Their turmeric crop across 2 acres had been damaged due to heavy rains in September, says Dinesh’s uncle Sanjay Jadav.
“Apart from finances, extreme weather events such as droughts and excess or unseasonal rainfall ruin standing crops, usually when they are about to be harvested,” says Nitnaware. Within Maharasthra, Marathwada remains the most drought-prone region. Last year, the then Eknath Shinde-led MahaYuti government declared 42 talukas as drought-hit, 14 of them in Marathwada.
However, Marathwada’s troubles aren’t limited to drought. In 2021 and 2022, excessive and unseasonal rainfall destroyed crops, further deepening the crisis for cultivators. In the previous MahaYuti government, two MLAs from the region, Abdul Sattar and Dhananjay Munde, held the Agriculture portfolio.
According to NCRB data, 11,290 people involved in the farming sector died by suicide in 2022, including 5,207 farmers or cultivators and 6,083 agricultural labourers. In comparison, 10,881 farming-related suicides were recorded in 2021, of which 5,318 were farmers. The data for 2023 is yet to be released by the NCRB.
Veteran journalist and author P. Sainath sheds light on the flaws and biases in farmer suicide data, particularly the NCRB. “For the first 15 to 19 years (from 1995 to 2014), the errors in NCRB data were largely omissions,” he explains. “They excluded many groups, especially women farmers. Whenever a farmer ends their life, officials conducting the panchanama (sequence of events) ask for the 7/12 document (land title deed). Tenant farmers, who don’t have a 7/12, are often left out. Dalits and Adivasis are also excluded, as Dalits often operate redistributed government land, and Adivasis are viewed as encroachers. These exclusions drastically reduced the reported numbers,” he explains.
Sainath says that since 2014, changes in methodology have further distorted the data. “Now, these are sins of political omission. In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced a new methodology for recording suicides and the result is that the data from 2014 to 2024 is entirely incomparable to earlier years. Farmers are now divided into categories —‘farmers,’ ‘tenant farmers,’ and ‘agricultural labourers.’ Most tenant farmers who end their lives are recorded as agricultural labourers, skewing the data,” he says.
During the Lok Sabha and Assembly election campaigns this year, farmers’ distress became a central issue for both the ruling MahaYuti coalition and the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). PM Modi had promised a Minimum Support Price (MSP) of ₹6,000 per quintal for soyabean, while Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said they would give ₹7,000 per quintal. Crop loan waivers, higher MSP, crop insurance, and free electricity had also topped their campaign agendas, highlighting the urgency to tackle the challenges faced by farmers in the State.
Systemic gaps
More than 200 km from Seema’s village, a small trek leads to Meena Dhere’s home in Pali, Beed. Meena, who is the same age as Seema and also has three children, left her younger daughter and son with their grandmother, Ranjana, who recently underwent a cataract surgery, to work in onion fields for ₹250 per day. The money was needed to run the house and clear the debts her husband, Ashok, had accumulated.
Ashok, 35, had taken a loan of around ₹3 lakh and took his own life on January 27. “Since then, we have been struggling to eat and pay the interest,” says Ranjana, wearing dark glasses to shield her eyes from the light. “I’m at home now because of the surgery, but otherwise, we would have taken the children with us to work, as there is no one else to care for them.”
Chandigarh-based food policy expert Devinder Sharma says the root cause of the persistent distress in agriculture is that prices of farm produce are kept artificially low to keep industry buoyant. “Agriculture provides raw materials for industries and also supplies cheap labour,” as marginal, distressed farmers work as daily labour in factories. “If farmers were paid fair prices, industries would suffer losses, and profits would decline. The problem isn’t that agriculture is unproductive—it’s that we simply don’t pay farmers what they deserve.”
Sharma points out that many farmers are driven to suicide because they cannot recover production costs, leading to mounting debt. He cites the National Sample Survey Organisation’s Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Holdings of Households in Rural India, YEAR. The average income of an agricultural household is just ₹10,218 per month. “If you calculate income purely from farming, it amounts to only ₹27 per day. With such meagre earnings, how can farmers survive? When a farmer takes their own life, it’s a stark indicator that we are denying them a fair income,” he says.
Meanwhile, at Gidhada of Paithan Taluka, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Sadhana Kalaskar, 45, lives in a house whose ‘walls’ are green nets used to shade plants. Over her head is a tin-sheet roof. Her husband, Ashok, 52, ended his life on November 24 after he failed to clear a loan of around ₹6 lakh taken for their daughter’s wedding and a crop which eventually failed. “Now, my son and I are toiling to clear the debts,” she says, staring at Ashok’s photo frame.
“While government schemes aim to address the financial struggles of farmers, the gap between policy and reality continues to widen, leaving families to fend for themselves in a system that seems to have forgotten them,” Nitnaware adds.
In addition to the accounts mentioned above, nearly a dozen families this correspondent visited across the region are grappling not only with the loss of their loved ones but also with the heavy burden of repaying loans and ensuring their children’s education, in addition to their own lives.
If you are in distress, call these 24x7 helplines: KIRAN 1800-599-0019, Aasra 9820466726.
Published - January 24, 2025 08:45 am IST
