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The vulnerable

Puttaswamy Gowda's wife, Ratnamma, and son.

FROM WITHIN an ocean of agrarian distress and poverty, there are but a few individuals who give up on life. Indebtedness may be the common factor in the suicides by farmers, but it is clearly not the only or the most immediate reason, as there are lakhs who live in similar conditions of debt and poverty.

For the individuals concerned the decision to end their lives could have hardly been easy. For the administration, those who have committed suicide are already just `cases' to decide compensation claims. The media perhaps treat them more sympathetically by telling the story of at least some of them. But by and large little is really known of the growing group of persons committing suicide; why and how their coping mechanisms are collapsing, and what makes them take that drastic last step.

So who commits suicide? "She had taken to brooding, sometimes crying, but had no one to share her sorrows with," Chikkamma, neighbour of 68-year-old Chennamma, says of her friend. Chennamma was a widow and family head. She hanged herself from the tree in front of her house in the early hours of September 7 in Valagerehalli village of Maddur taluk in Mandya district. Her 30-year-old son, Kumar, and daughter-in-law, Leela, lived with her in a fairly large pucca house, which she owned.

Chennamma gave no indication of her plans to anyone. Nor did she reveal her anxieties to her family, working and even eating normally till the last day. She sent her daughter-in-law to her parents' house the day before she committed suicide, and slipped out of the house around 4 a.m. without waking up her son.

It was only her perceptive friend who sensed the depression that she was in, perhaps for months prior to her death.

"She would sit for hours ruminating near the lake while grazing her goats. A month ago, she got a notice from the society asking her to repay her loan. The moneylenders were asking for repayment too. This is the life of a farmer. We may as well die than live such a life," says Chikkamma.

Shankare Gowda and Puttaswamy Gowda from the nearby villages of Arechakanahalli and Bidirahalli knew neither each other nor Chennamma. But both of them went through a similar experience as Chennamma, of a long period of depression followed by severe anxiety just prior to committing suicide. Puttuswamy Gowda had stopped going out for work and would stay at home minding the house and cattle. He too used to break down and weep frequently, harassed and humiliated in front of the village community by the moneylenders or their henchmen. He sent his wife and two sons away the day before he died. "I left the previous night to my parents' house to borrow money from them," his wife Ratnamma recalled. "When I returned in the morning, the door was locked from inside. He had hanged himself in the house."

Shankare Gowda committed suicide leaving behind a very young wife and two small children.

"He was always worried about the debt situation and would talk about it to me," his wife Prameela said. A visit by a group of the moneylenders a few days before he died seems to have been a turning point for him. He took to bed with a headache for four days. On the day of his death, his wife left for work at 10 a.m. after which he locked the door and hanged himself. "Our lives have changed. We feel crushed from all sides," his brother, L. Some Gowda, said.

"The issue of honour and standing in the village is very important for a farmer. The loss of public face owing to the inability to repay a loan is something that not all persons can face," V. Ashok, a resident of Chennamma's village and State Secretary of the KRRS, said.

The extreme uncertainty of agriculture is itself a predisposing factor for emotional instability amongst those who depend on it for a living. "Suicides are epidemical," argues R.S. Deshpande who heads the Agricultural Development and Rural Transformation Unit at the Institute for Socio-Economic Change, and who was also a member of the Veeresh Committee that probed farmers' suicides in 2000-2001. "Those prone to suicides collect data on how to die well before they actually do," he says. He identifies several other reasons for the recent suicides.

"The uncertainty of income, the absence of social safety nets of any kind, market imperfections, unremunerative agriculture, and the absence of village institutions and village bonding have contributed to the spate of deaths amongst farmers." — P.M.

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