The Misery of Cotton ; Despite Rising Exports, Indian Cotton Farmers Are Either Killing Themselves or Barely Surviving. Why? Bt Travels to the Worst Affected Areas in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh to Find Out.

Summary

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Lakshmi Bhindare sits outside her mud hut, clutching a framed photo of her husband. There's a date scrawled in Marathi across the bottom of the picture: 19.1.2006. That was the day when Nanda Nameshwar Bhindare went out to his small 10-acre farm outside this village of Bhadmuri, 160-km southwest of Nagpur.

It was a trip he had made thousands of time before. But this time, he never returned. As they discovered the next morning, Bhindare had consumed pesticide-to kill himself. Unlike the other widows of farmers who killed themselves, Lakshmi chose not to return to her parental home, but stay on in Bhadmuri and take care of her two children and an aged mother-in-law. When the news of yet another farmer suicide went out of the small village, the local tehsildar came visiting and promised to get her the Rs 1 lakh that the Maharashtra government pays to the families of farmers who kill themselves. But, of course, not one rupee has come in the past two months. Lakshmi, barely in her mid-30s, is resigned to her fate; she doesn't know what she and her children will do next.

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The Misery of Cotton ; Despite Rising Exports, Indian Cotton Farmers Are Either Killing Themselves or Barely Surviving. Why? Bt Travels to the Worst Affected Areas in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh to Find Out.

But she knows one thing: Her son won't grow up to be a cotton farmer and she won't marry off her daughter to a man who has anything to do with cotton. "Kapas (cotton) has ruined my life, it shouldn't ruin the lives of my children," she says in Marathi. Bhindare, a cotton farmer, had killed himself when he couldn't repay the Rs 20,000 he had borrowed from a moneylender because his crop failed. In death, it seems, your loans are forgiven.

It is as much ironic as tragic that India's cotton farmers should be in such a sorry state of affairs. With an estimated 9 million hectares under cotton cultivation, India accounts for a quarter of cotton acreage in the wo...

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