DRIVEN TO DEATH

The once-prosperous farming villages of Wayanad district in Kerala are witnessing a spate of suicides by farmers, who are unable to repay loans because of a severe drought and the resultant crop failure.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR in Wayanad Photographs: S. Ramesh Kurup

TRAGIC, theatrical events are taking place in Kerala's once-prosperous farming villages. In the first week of April, at Mundakkayam, in the central district of Kottayam, a 58-year-old indebted coffee cultivator consumed poison in front of a crowd. He died the next day in a local hospital. He had a suicide note in his pocket.

A few weeks earlier, in the northern hill district of Wayanad, a middle-aged pepper cultivator at Pulpally in Sulthan Bathery taluk amassed firewood in his courtyard and set it ablaze in order to kill himself and raze his home and the surrounding slope of yellow pepper vines, destroyed beyond redemption by the severe drought that has hit the district. Neighbours who saved him now advise visitors not to speak to the man, who they say is under the spell of alcohol and ganja and mistakes every stranger for a "bank employee out to recover a loan".

In late March, at another village in the same taluk, a 69-year-old widow with four children, ended her life minutes after a bank employee made her sign a notice informing the family of some debt-relief measures announced in the wake of the drought. The woman had inherited a huge burden of debt from her husband. When crops failed repeatedly and a severe drought descended on the hills, she was forced to go in for more loans. Living as she did under the constant fear of recovery proceedings, she misunderstood the bank notice to be the final straw.

By April 11, over a two-month period, 19 farmers had committed suicide in Kerala, some of them in dramatic circumstances. Thirteen of them were from the predominantly farming district of Wayanad, known the world over for its pepper, cardamom, ginger and other spices and condiments and coffee. At villages like Pulpally and Mullankolli, previously known as the `Kuwait in Kerala' or `the Gulf in Kerala' for the prosperity that came with booming pepper and coffee prices, farmers are distraught and have more or less similar tales of woe to recount.

When the prices of pepper, coffee, tea and ginger touched a high a few years ago, life suddenly became rosy for the farmers. Private financiers were dime a dozen then and they competed with the nationalised and cooperative banks, which have established branches in every nook and corner of the `lucrative' district to offer `agricultural loans' to the farmers. Many farmers took loans beyond their repayment capability, from several sources and at high rates of interest.

Agricultural loans were offered even for non-agricultural purposes. Consumer goods and four-wheeler sales touched a high in the district. For example, of the total bank loans in the district, 76.5 per cent have been disbursed in the priority sector. (The State average is 52.5 per cent.) According to officials of the lead bank in the district, Canara Bank, the majority of the loans are given in the farm sector. While the average credit-deposit ratio in Kerala is 46 per cent, in Wayanad it is 188 per cent.

K.M. Pundarikakshan, District Manager of the lead bank, said: "Banks were quite liberal in disbursing loans to the farmers of Wayanad. The farmers too were eager to obtain loans and often borrowed beyond their means. If there were five members in a family, all five would borrow. Per family borrowings are very high in the district. Last year, the credit target for the district was fixed at Rs.398 crores. By December, Rs.288 crores had already been disbursed. The target for the next year has been fixed at Rs.450 crores."

According to M. Sreedharan Nair, General Manager of Wayanad District Cooperative Bank Ltd., the apex bank in the cooperative sector, banks were liberal in giving loans because Wayanad continued to be the lead producer of cash crops and it had a multi-cropping pattern. "For example, coffee is grown as a pure crop and as a mixed crop along with pepper. Most farmers therefore take separate loans for various crops on the same piece of land. Moreover, cash crops require high investment. For example, the production cost of an acre of pepper is around Rs.50,000. Farmers take loans for the same crop from different banks as also from the `blade companies' (private financiers who charge interest at cut-throat rates)," he said.

All seemed well in Wayanad until 2000, when the prices of farm commodities began to plummet along with farm production as a result of the drought and the widespread occurrence of plant diseases. This correspondent was swamped by distraught farmers at small village junctions in the worst-affected panchayats of Pulpally and Mullankolli on April 5, a day before the first summer rains hit Wayanad. Many of them wanted the media to understand "the real situation under the (still) green, picturesque canopy of Wayanad."

Under the yellowing trees providing shade and support in the coffee-pepper plantations and homestead gardens, the earth was brown and dry, and acres of high-value pepper crop lay burnt by the heat of the past two years. "A new crop would take over three years, if at all the majority of the small-holder farmers are able to raise it," P.J. Isaac, a retired schoolteacher and a farmer, told Frontline. He said that a quintal of pepper used to fetch Rs.26,000 in 2000 but the price was only around Rs.7,800 today. Coffee, which was priced at Rs.70 a kg four years ago, was worth only Rs.16.50 a kg now.

At Paadithara, Anandavalli, a 62-year-old woman said people of the locality had started moving elsewhere in search of jobs. "Many farmers have turned labourers. Young women are now willing to move to other districts in search of unfamiliar jobs. Several women have been offered jobs as home nurses in districts such as Kannur and Pathanamthitta," she said.

At Sita Mount, Chacko, who owns a five-acre (two-hectare) homestead crop of pepper, ginger, banana and coffee, said 99 per cent of the crop had been destroyed in the drought. He had taken loans totalling nearly Rs.6 lakhs from several local banks, in addition to other "private loans". "I was very prompt in paying the loan instalments until 2000. From then on I have been unable to repay my debts," he said. Chacko said that despite the fall in prices, he could have managed to repay at least part of the loan had he not lost his crop.

"Successive drought years have led to spiralling losses. Production has come down drastically. It has left no one in this village untouched," Thomas, another farmer, who owns six acres (2.4 ha) of drought-hit pepper crop, said.

The majority of the farmers in the region are descendants of settlers from other parts of Kerala, especially the central parts, who moved into the virgin, fertile forests in large numbers. K.I. Mathew, a local representative of the Indian Farmers' Movement (INFAM), is a typical settler farmer in the region, with large tracts of pepper and coffee crop that have been laid waste. He moved to Wayanad in the early 1960s and started cultivating paddy and tapioca and later the golden crops, pepper, coffee and ginger, on reclaimed land. "Never in recent years have farmers here faced such a drought. Never have prices fallen to the extent they have in the past few years. It is an alarming situation," he said.

According to the Lead Bank Office at Kalpetta, the district headquarters, there has been a huge backlog in loan repayments to banks over the past three years. A total sum of Rs.162.46 crores remains to be repaid. Until December 2003, the total loans disbursed by all the banks in the district amounted to Rs.706.8 crores, of which Rs.187 crores was provided by the cooperative sector banks. According to District Cooperative Bank officials, loans to the tune of Rs.74.8 crores are overdue in the cooperative sector. The overdue amount in the case of the nationalised and gramin banks is Rs.87.56 crores, of which Rs.67.3 crores is accounted for by farm loans. The banks "recovered" 88 per cent of the agricultural loans in 2001, 72 per cent in 2002 and merely 68 per cent in 2003. Bank officials said that often "recovery" meant that outstanding loans were "closed by converting them into fresh loans".

Chandran, who lost 2.25 acres (0.9 ha) of pepper crop, the sole source of income for his family, told Frontline: "When production and prices were high, farmers were induced by the banks into taking loans at very high interest rates. When things began to go wrong, they offered to convert the high interest and principal into fresh loans, putting us into debt far in excess of the original loan amount. We will never be able to repay these loans. Every year, by offering to re-phase the loans, the banks in effect were pushing the farmer further and further into debt."

This is a common refrain among farmers in the district, who are increasingly being organised by some organisations into militant action against the banks and government authorities. "In the past two months there were several instances of farmers' organisations besieging government offices and preventing people from repaying or renewing loans, especially in the context of a series of suicides by indebted farmers. The non-repayment of loans is pushing the cooperative banks into a crisis," Sreedharan Nair said. Mainstream bankers say that farmers are harassed more by private financiers, who charge exorbitant interest rates and use coercive methods to force repayment. "They make you sign a stamp paper and a blank cheque and give you the money. It is easy to get loans from the private financiers. Hence they get customers. The interest rates are exorbitant, often as high as 36 per cent - and farmers will be under tremendous pressure to repay," Joseph, a farmer at Sulthan Bathery, said.

The number of persons who commit suicide has been steadily increasing in Kerala, from 9,778 in 1999 to 9,304 in 2000 and 9,572 in 2001. The rate of suicides rose from 13 per lakh persons in 1981 to 32 per lakh persons in 2002, which was three times the all-India rate. In many districts, counselling centres established by NGOs and other agencies are flooded with phone calls from persons seeking support. According to the organisers of a recent seminar in Thiruvananthapuram, nearly 80,000 people attempt to commit suicide every year in the State. In Wayanad, a crisis management centre opened by INFAM received in the first two days of its inauguration nearly 300 calls from people wanting to end their own lives. In the past decade, on an average over 300 persons committed suicide every year in Wayanad district alone. The figure was 320 in 2002. Though a sudden fall in financial status and loss of social reputation, along with family problems and illness, are among the major causes of suicides in Kerala, domino-suicides by farmers who are unable to cope with mounting debts and crop losses in such a short period constitute a new trend in the State.

Farmers' suicides have been reported from six of the 14 districts, including Wayanad, the intensely drought-hit Palakkad, Kottayam, Kannur, Idukki and Thiruvananthapuram. Sucides by farmers continued to take place even after the first package of relief measures was announced by the State government. In response to an appeal by the government, the State-level Bankers' Committee announced a six-month moratorium on revenue recovery measures on agricultural loans, and the conversion of short-term loans and crop loans that are due for repayment during the period of drought to medium-term loans repayable in three to seven years, with the interest portion of such loans to be paid only during the harvesting/marketing of the next crop. Banks also expressed their readiness to provide fresh crop loans to farmers.

But, at the dingy village office at Mullankolli, the sight of nearly 200-odd farmers waiting in a queue to submit applications for drought relief brought home the mood of the farmers. "We are deep in debt and they are offering us more loans," one of them said. The village officer, R. Manikantan, said that over 6,500 applications had been received from Mullankolli for drought relief for 34 varieties of crops.

The Farmers Relief Forum, another organisation, had been mobilising farmers all over the State to fight against recovery proceedings and to demand that farm loans be written off. The forum organised protests at several places, with farmers carrying farm produce instead of loan instalments to the banks and demanding that they be paid the price that existed at the time when the banks fixed the high interest rates. It organised farmers in order to prevent recovery proceedings and to get back property attached by banks from indebted farmers.

On April 13, over a thousand farmers under the banner of INFAM organised a siege of the lead bank at Kalpetta and declared that the farmers of Wayanad were "on their own writing off their bank loans". Director of the Wayanad unit of INFAM Fr. Robin Vadakkencheril told Frontline that the organisation, with over 650 units and nearly 11,000 active members in the districts, would spread the message that the farmers of Wayanad need not bother about their debt burden any more. He said that with the April 13 declaration they would consider all loans as closed and would fight any kind of recovery measures collectively. "We won't bother about our debts any longer. If a bank initiates recovery measures against a farmer, we will force the closure of that branch. This is the only way we can save our brethren from committing suicide. Three of our members are soon to launch a `fast unto death' at Kalpetta demanding complete debt relief for farmers," he said. The same day Chief Minister A. K. Antony announced a one-year moratorium on recovery proceedings against farmers and a five-year repayment period for farm loans originally due for repayment in 2003-2004 and availed through primary cooperative societies. The cooperative banks have been asked to provide Rs.50,000 to the families of farmers who died.

But, for the farmers of Wayanad, especially the members of the families of those who committed suicide, the collective action by farmers and the relief measures announced by the government mean too little, too late.