As calls for a ‘second green revolution’ begin to be heard, it is important to examine the legacy of the first. In Punjab, the laboratory of the revolution, the experiment seems to have gone wrong — water tables have declined, agriculture has become non-remunerative, and farmer suicides are on the rise.
In their new film Candles in the Wind , documentary filmmakers Kavita Bahl and Nandan Saxena look at the state heralded as the food bowl of India, and find something rotten at its core. The film, which recently won the best documentary film award at SiGNS 2014 film festival and a special mention at the National Film Awards-2013, travels through Bathinda, Sangrur and Mansa districts in the Malwa region of Punjab to bring us stories of the victims of the Green Revolution.
“In the name of the Green Revolution, the fertilisers and pesticides that were dumped here became the major reason behind farm loans. With their introduction, input costs on crops increased drastically. Farmers didn’t get fair price for their produce. This deficit due to high input cost and low price for the produce became the major reason for mounting debts,” a farmers’ union representative explains in the film.
The spiral of debt has exacted a heavy price on small and marginal farmers in Punjab, often resulting in loss of land and life. According to an estimate, the state witnessed nearly 7000 suicides between 2000 and 2011. The film brings home the distress as it is borne by families, especially women, in the aftermath of suicides.
Karamjeet Kaur, one of the characters in the film, recalls the year her wheat crop was destroyed. “Creditors, pesticide and fuel dealers and commission agents came every day for about ten to fifteen days. After the crop failure what could we tell the creditors?” she asks despairingly. With the family under immense financial strain, her husband committed suicide. The debt that stood at six lakhs then has grown to 18 lakhs now, and even as they soldier on, the government seems indifferent to the plight of Karamjeet and her two sons. The lives of Sukhwinder Kaur of Bathinda and Mahinderpal Kaur of Sangrur have also followed a similar course.
For the directors, both of whom have familial ties with Punjab, the decision to tell these stories came from the omissions of their earlier film, Cotton for my shroud , which documented farmer suicides in Vidarbha. “When we were doing that film, we felt we weren’t really talking about the women. Because the loan doesn’t go away after the man dies. The women have to deal with the loan, the moneylenders, the banks and their lives after the man is gone,” they say. “Most of the farm widows have a hand-to-mouth existence. The Punjab government gives them a widow pension of Rs.250 per month. Can a widow survive on this money? Can she repay her loan? Most of these women are suffering from depression but cannot afford treatment. They are holding on to their small land holdings in the hope that the Government shall one day wake up to their plight and waive off the loan amount.”
They refer to these women as the widows of the Green Revolution. “Who says the Green Revolution was a revolution...What is a revolution supposed to do? By definition it is a mass uprising, it is not a thought injected by a corporation by arm twisting a government to force a large number of people to change the way they harvest their seed and grow their food. No revolution works like this,” says Nandan indignantly.
Apart from Cotton for my shroud and Candles in the wind , Kavita and Nandan have also interrogated developmental paradigms and policies with regard to agriculture in Hollow Cylinder and Dammed , which deal with issues related to bamboo in India and the dam-affected people of the Narmada valley, respectively. On the anvil are two more films on Punjab, with one devoted to the rise in the incidence of cancer in specific regions of the State. This, the filmmakers argue, is a product of the chemical-intensive farming the Green Revolution introduced, and in turn feeds the financial distress of agricultural labourers.
At a time when there is a “huge disconnect between urban and rural India” and farmers are increasingly seen as a dispensable people, their people-centric films are a bridge, a call of conscience. “Sometimes people ask us ‘do you think your films are going to make a difference?’ We always tell them we are like farmers. We are sowing the seeds of awareness. It’s for the people to pick them up.”
