The Beautiful and the Damned (23 page)

The desperation of the farmers in Hasakothur for water, and their frantic digging to find aquifers, is part of a disturbing national trend. Michael Specter, an American journalist, noted in a 2006 article in the
New Yorker
that after thirty years, two million wells in India had proliferated to twenty-three million. He also pointed out that digging too deep brings in saltwater and arsenic contamination, something that has been happening in West Bengal and Punjab, both highly modernized agricultural states. ‘As sources dry up and wells are abandoned, farmers have turned on each other and on themselves,’
Specter wrote. ‘Indian newspapers are filled with accounts of … “suicide farmers”, driven to despair by poverty, debt, and often by drought.’ The Planning Commission of the Indian government, meanwhile, in a recent study on Andhra Pradesh, observed that as irrigation through canals remained stagnant and tank irrigation declined, the number of borewells has increased exponentially, especially in Telangana, depleting the water table and leading to ‘suicide deaths’.

For Gopeti, this was all part of his life. Three farmers had killed themselves the previous year in Hasakothur after incurring debts of a couple of lakh rupees each. The money had been used largely to sink borewells to find the water that would have allowed the men to keep farming. Gopeti’s own livelihood was precarious. His working day began at four in the morning, when he fed his two buffaloes. At six, he and his wife left for the fields, carrying a lunch of rice, dal and vegetables. They took one break at nine and another at two to eat, returning from the fields at six. Gopeti’s wife went home to take care of the cooking while he hung out at the village tea stall with other farmers till eight. In a good year, Gopeti might make 40,000 to 60,000 rupees, but this was never assured, and he could easily find himself owing that amount. Even when he made money, that had to be measured against the size of his family, which included his parents, his wife, and three daughters between the ages of five and fifteen.

By the time Gopeti took me to see his house, it was already past eight. He didn’t seem keen to introduce me to his family, and I didn’t want to press the issue, so we surveyed the house from outside. It was a two-storey concrete structure arranged around a courtyard, the rafters stuffed with firewood that Gopeti’s family gathered every few months from nearby forests. The house was nearly three decades old, having replaced a mud hut that had stood there before. The concrete house had not been built with money made from farming, Gopeti said as we walked back to Dr Satyanarayana’s house. Gopeti’s father had worked in the Gulf as a labourer for two decades, saving money that he used to build his family a new house. In fact, Gopeti himself had stayed out of debt by working in the Gulf.

Although Gopeti had given me the impression of being completely
rooted in his village, he had left home at the age of twenty. A middleman had found him a job in Dubai, the kind of menial labour that is carried out by millions of South Asian immigrants in the rich Gulf States of the Middle East. The middleman’s commission for getting Gopeti the job was 50,000 rupees. Gopeti travelled out of Hasakothur with nine others from the village, all young men leaving their homes for the first time. They went by bus to Bombay, where they waited for a week as their papers were sorted out. They shared one tiny room, but because they had almost no money and a large amount of debt from having to pay the middleman’s fee, they avoided going out into the city that they had seen in films and on television. One night, they were driven to the airport and put in the care of a foremanlike worker as they took the flight to Dubai. There, Gopeti went to work at a construction site. He worked for nine hours a day and six days a week, with Fridays off. He slept at a workers’ camp in a tent, on what he said was a ‘double khatiya’, which I, after some effort, translated back into ‘bunk bed’. On his day off, Gopeti cooked and did his laundry. As in Bombay, he avoided the city, and after working for two years, he made enough money to repay the loan he had taken to give the middleman his commission. He saved another 50,000 rupees on top of that, which went into buying a borewell for his farm when he came back to Hasakothur.

The electricity in the village had gone out, so we were sitting outside Dr Satyanarayana’s house, hoping to stay cool from the few wisps of wind blowing through the sleepy, dark village. The doctor had been listening to us, accompanied by a small and surprisingly bitter-looking man wearing glasses.

The man spoke up when Gopeti finished his story with his return to the village. ‘He’s not telling you how bad it really was there,’ he said, staring accusingly at Gopeti.

The farmer laughed and shook his head. ‘There’s no point going into too many details,’ he said.

The man, whose name was Janardan, leaned closer towards me. He was the village tailor, he said, and he had spent years working in Dubai and in Saudi Arabia. ‘It’s horrible there,’ he said. ‘The Arabs hate us. And after all the money you pay to brokers, after all the work
you do, you have nothing.’ And yet there was no alternative. He had sent his own son to Dubai in 2004 to work as an electrician, he said, paying a middleman 80,000 rupees. He borrowed the money, which with interest had become 100,000 rupees in a year’s time. ‘It’s like running against a clock that’s faster than you,’ he said. He slumped back again, staring into the darkness.

I asked him if he earned money in the village from tailoring.

He looked at Gopeti and laughed. ‘They never have money for new clothes. My wife makes about five hundred rupees a month from rolling beedis. We live on that.’

A few days after visiting Hasakothur, I finally managed to see the district collector of Nizamabad. It was Saturday morning when I went to meet him at his house, where I was let in by an armed guard and pointed towards the sprawling bungalow where the collector had a home office. It was a large room, with rows of empty chairs facing the collector’s desk, as if he was in the habit of giving lectures or performances from the desk. He wasn’t in the room when I was led in, and I sat there for a while, watching the incense sticks on the desk sending their curls of smoke up towards the bright poster of a waterfall.

The collector was a heavyset man, wearing a bright orange shirt, and he surprised me by his candour. The trouble over the red sorghum, he said, was a symptom of the crisis in rural Telangana. The instability in agriculture was something which had been created in great part by the new class of seed dealers. They had connections to politicians, and under the patronage and protection this offered, they often formed syndicates among themselves to manipulate crop prices. The seed dealers made money out of all this, as did their buyers, but the farmers lost heavily in the process.

The price for red sorghum had been rather low the year before, the collector said, and the farmers had wanted the government to intervene on their behalf. He had therefore held an auction in the presence of all the seed dealers where the highest price for red sorghum had
come from Mahipal Reddy. The farmers, naturally, had accepted this bid. The collector had wanted to be sure that Mahipal’s business was sound enough to handle such a large order, and Mahipal had accordingly showed him a guarantee note from a bank for 40 crore rupees to prove that he would be able to pay the farmers. The trouble began after this, when the farmers had nearly finished growing the crop. A syndicate of dealers opposed to Mahipal had gone to the bank that had issued the guarantee note. They had told the bank that there would be such an excess of red sorghum that prices were bound to be far lower than what Mahipal had offered the farmers. The bank went back on its guarantee note and cancelled its loan to Mahipal. The farmers began their agitation, and the collector was convinced that they were instigated to do so by the rival syndicate. Mahipal then asked the collector for time, promising to pay interest on the money he owed to the farmers. But some of the traders who had originally been part of Mahipal’s syndicate now defected to the other side, even as Prabhakar’s party began to put pressure on the government, with the farmers beginning a hunger strike. The collector agreed to buy the red sorghum at 12 rupees a kilo, promising that if the state made more than this amount, the excess would be given to the farmers. The cheques I had seen being written out at the municipal office on my first morning in Armoor were part of the government’s payment to the farmers.

It was a simple, happy ending to a complicated story, where the government’s role was a reassuring, paternal one. But the collector had his reasons for believing that the government had to be active in supporting farmers. They were largely illiterate, he said, and didn’t have unions. Only the rich, connected farmers were organized enough to have a union. The collector thought that the problems being faced by poorer farmers had increased since the government stopped subsidizing agricultural commodities – offering a guaranteed rate to farmers if they did not manage to sell their crops to private buyers for a higher price. But support prices were among the practices dismantled by the Naidu-McKinsey approach, leaving farmers to function in the best way they could in the free market with its syndicates, price volatility and speculation.

The collector seemed, for all the trappings of power, to have a
good sense of the situation in rural India. He had mentioned the Maoists in passing with a note of sympathy, and when I said it was surprising to hear a government official not denouncing the guerrillas, he laughed. ‘I am from a rural background,’ he said. ‘From a landowning class, that’s true. But it’s the urban officers and the people at the very top who think of the Maoists as enemies. In many villages, a few families own everything. You can see that, and if you do, then you know that the Naxalites have to be made partners in the national value system.’ He paused for a moment and thought. ‘If you see the Maoists who are killed by the police in encounters, none of them have more than forty kilos of flesh on them. They’re skin and bones. And these are the enemies of the state?’

The collector was reaffirming much of what I had heard in Hyderabad, some of it from a man called Ramanjaneyulu. He ran a non-profit organization called the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in a house off a narrow lane. He was a rather intense man, vibrating with nervous energy, addressing me in a rapid-fire manner while he answered his mobile phone or checked mail on his laptop. But Ramanjaneyulu was willing to criticize the government as well as the market in his comments about the state of agriculture in India. Until 2004, he had been an agriculture officer in the government. But he left the service when he became convinced that the government’s approach towards agriculture, characterized by its cosy nexus with multinationals and its focus on modernization and genetically modified seeds, was quite wrong.

‘We don’t have the US kind of subsidies, technical support and accountability, which allows you to sue the producer if the seed doesn’t work,’ he said. ‘The first farmer suicide took place in the state in 1986, and that was because the cotton crop failed. There was an incident of white flies, to which the government responded by bringing in new pesticides, which in turn led to new problems, to which GM was proposed as a solution.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘The present model is unsustainable. What you need is small farming based on an ecological and sustainable model, which is what our centre tries to encourage in villages. Otherwise, we’re looking at a situation where four hundred million farmers will move out of their land by 2011.’

The farmers had been moving off the land in large numbers from
the time of the British. I came from a family of farmers too, with my grandfather an unschooled peasant who had grown rice. When my father and his brothers had talked about the past, which was rarely, they mentioned only the good things: the mangoes plucked from trees; the boat taken to school during seasonal floods; the songs sung by my grandfather, who was a strolling minstrel as well as a peasant. I had to look into the edges of these stories to find the darker material: the nameless man killed by my great-grandfather for stealing crops; the death of one of my uncles in early childhood; the earnestness with which my father pursued studies at the village school, convinced even then that farming was a way of the past; the white men who appeared from time to time as spectral representatives of the British Empire; and the silent exodus from that village when independence in 1947 brought with it the partition of the subcontinent into three parts.

Yet even though the life of the Indian farmer had been precarious in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it had required the incredible trauma of famines that killed millions as well as the ethnic cleansing of the 1947 partition to move large numbers of peasants off their land and into slums. But the numbers Ramanjaneyulu was talking about were simply staggering. Four hundred million people made up nearly one-fourteenth of the world’s population, and it seemed impossible that the transformation of so many people from rural to urban poor could be achieved without some kind of cataclysm. But there was no doubt that the process was under way, if in a slow trickle compared to the magnitude of the numbers involved. Long after I had left Armoor, I found it surprising when I realized how many of the people I had met there were in transition from farming. The collector was from a farming family, while Devaram, the Dalit agitator, had been a farm worker. Even Mahipal Reddy, the dealer at the centre of the red sorghum story, had once been a farmer.

But it took me a long time to get to Mahipal. I had called him soon after my visit to Hasakothur. He was polite but evasive, saying that
he was travelling too much to talk to me and in any case didn’t want to go into the red sorghum story. I kept pestering him and finally, one Saturday, he agreed to meet me and give me his version of the events. He asked me to come to his warehouse outside of Armoor that afternoon. Before that, he would be busy in Nizamabad town, where he had some business to take care of. I told him I was in the town and could meet him right there, but he insisted that I come to the warehouse. ‘Just call me before you show up, to make sure that I’m back from Nizamabad,’ he said.