When Tuhi Ram Jat left home on his motorcycle for a regular round of his agricultural field on the outskirts of the village on a sultry morning earlier this week, little did his two teenage sons realise that it was the last time they would see their father’s face. Their world was torn apart by the afternoon.
The suicide by Tuhi Ram, 38, on Wednesday came as a rude shock to the residents of the small and dusty Sogar village in Bharatpur district of Rajasthan. The debt-ridden farmer hanged himself from a tree on his farmland with a rope made of old saris. The body was spotted by some women grazing cows.
“Tuhi Ram was a thorough gentleman. He had no enemies in the village. The soft-spoken man never told us that he was in so much of trouble ... We would have definitely helped him out,” his 62-year-old neighbour, Daryauv Singh, said on Saturday.
Mr. Singh was among the villagers who went to meet the District Collector seeking help for the bereaved family.
Tuhi Ram’s younger brother Yogesh Kumar told The Hindu at the family’s modest two-room house that the deceased was under intense pressure to repay a loan of ₹4 lakh taken by him from the Rural Cooperative Bank and through the Kisan Credit Card. He ran the risk of losing his ancestral agricultural land as well as the land registered in his two brothers’ names, totalling 12 bighas , which he had mortgaged.
Mounting debt
The crop loan passbooks show no transactions after 2012 for the loans obtained in 2008, taking the penal interest to as high as 16% on the overdue amounts.
The family members said the debts also included the money lent by private lenders, and loans obtained in the name of Tuhi Ram’s wife Babli from a women’s self-help group.
The farmer had sown jowar crop on six bighas of his farmland last week, but it did not survive because of lack of rain.
Sogar sarpanch Vikram Singh said the salinity of groundwater in the region makes it unfit for drinking and farming, forcing the farmers to depend on rain for agriculture.
Even as Congress MLA from Deeg-Kumher Vishvendra Singh, who visited the village on Thursday, has demanded a compensation of ₹10 lakh, the district administration has maintained that there is no provision for financial assistance in a suicide case.
