Tenant farmers or lessee farmers constituted more than 75% of the farmers who committed suicide in the State during the past four years, a study revealed.
The study by the Rythu Swarajya Vedika in association with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences started with a target of reaching out to families of 1,000 victims who committed suicide between June 2014 and April this year and could reach 692 families covering 23 districts of the State. Of these, 520 farmers were tenant farmers who had taken land on lease and cultivated it.
Of the total 692 farmers, 93 farmers comprising 13.5% of the total sample were landless while another 313 comprising 45% were marginal farmers with holdings less than 2.5 acres. As many as 236 small farmers with less than five acre land holdings, comprising 34%, were among those who committed suicide largely due to debt burden.
Marginal farmers
The pattern of debt suggested that access to bank loans to the victims were very limited, especially among marginal and landless farmers, forcing them to heavily depend on private loans. The study revealed that 265 out of the 520 tenant farmers who committed suicide reported no outstanding bank loans, but were saddled with burden of more than ₹4 lakh of private loans on an average.
“It was the pressure of private loans that led to suicide,” the study said adding the pattern indicated that these farmers did not get any benefit from the government measures like loan waiver.
The debt pattern among the landless in particular indicated that their bank loan was only ₹11,000, but the average outstanding private loan was at a high of ₹3.64 lakh.
In terms of cropping pattern, 81.4% of farmers who committed suicide cultivated cotton, including several of them who cultivated multiple crops in different parts of their holdings.
Lease holding
In addition to paddy and maize farmers, 10% of farmers who committed suicide cultivated red gram, which had seen increase in cultivation in the past couple of years, but did not get the promised prices. In terms of social pattern, 61% of those who ended their lives hailed from the backward classes followed by 17% Scheduled Castes and 11% Scheduled Tribes.
Based on the assertion by the government that presence of lessee farmers was marginal in the State and that their agreements with land owners varied from year to year, survey was undertaken in three villages — Pottipalli in Sadashivpet mandal of Sangareddy district, Itikyala in Luxettipet mandal of Mancherial district and Gimma in Jainath mandal of Adilabad district — to test the veracity of these assertions.
The study revealed that the lease period of over 50% of farmers was between three and five years and 28.2% of them leased out the same land for more than five years.
While the government had asserted that landowners would pass on the benefit of Rythu Bandhu scheme to lessees, this was not seen at the ground level where a section of land owners, in fact, enhanced the lease rates.
