Rythu Swarajya Vedika, an NGO working for the welfare of farmers, has come out with a list of 341 farmers who committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh in just six months from August 2015 to February 2016, for reasons ranging from huge debt, crop loss due to drought to failure of borewells.
Kiran Kumar Vissa of the vedika said the list and a report of the fact-finding team that visited families of the 40 farmers who took the extreme step, was submitted to the High Court of Hyderabad, which was hearing petition on farmer suicides in Telangana and AP. “Though Telangana drew more attention over farmer suicides, such unfortunate instances were many in Andhra Pradesh too. We have compiled them from newspaper reports but our team visited the households of forty farmers to study the gravity of the situation.”
Farmer suicides were reported from seven districts of Kurnool, Anantapur, Guntur, East Godavari, Prakasam, Kadapa, and Chittoor and the fact-finding team visited some of the villages and undertook a detailed study of these 40 farmers. Some of the important findings of the team include too much of dependence of farmers on private money lenders. Eighty-seven per cent of the forty farmers who committed suicide took loans from private money lenders and only 13 per cent from banks. Rate of interest being charged by private lenders ranged from 24 per cent to 60 per cent. In 27 cases out of 40, the family members explicitly said that the farmer faced pressure from the private lenders.
Twenty-two of the 40 farmers were tenant farmers and none of them received Loan Eligibility Cards and their average debt worked out to be Rs. 4,27,000. Thirty-nine of the 40 farmers had faced heavy crop loss due to drought, cyclone or flood and with no help from the government either in the form of compensation or crop insurance, they ran into debts, the report said.
