ADILABAD: Beerola Ashok, a 46-year-old farmer, committed suicide by consuming agrochemical pesticide Monocil on August 7, 2018, after his cotton crop was affected by pink bollworm and the red gram he cultivated was washed away by heavy rains. The panchanama and FIR by the police and revenue officials revealed that Ashok cultivated cotton in five acres of leased land and had taken a loan of ?3 lakh from a private lender.The story of deepening agrarian crisis still unfolding in Telangana that has been forcing farmers into debt and ultimately suicide, reveals yet another dark aspect – the socalled state government schemes being rolled out have done nothing to alleviate the distress of tenant farmers.“Rythu Bandhu is a good move. But unfortunately, in Telangana, the government made a mistake of restricting it only to landowners. As a result, many tenant farmers, who do the cultivation and bear all the risks, are not able to get this support and many landowners (NRIs), who left farming long back and left their villages, state and country, still got this support. This will create a very unhealthy situation of strongly incentivising land and not cultivation,” says GV Ramanjaneyulu, agricultural scientist, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture.A recent report of Rythu Swarajya Vedika, which was prepared with the help of students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), too supports this theory. It states that of the 692 farmer suicides it studied, around 75% are tenant farmers and 88% of whom are Dalits, tribals or from backward castes.The study also reveals that the government has no mechanism to assess the number of tenant farmers as the tenancy is oral and not based on a written agreement.According to farmers’ associations, combined Adilabad district alone has witnessed 435 suicides since 2014, including 62 this year, with tenant farmers being the worst hit. SCRB (state crime records bureau) farmer suicide data shows four districts of reorganised Adilabad reported 146 suicides since 2105 and 32 in 2018.Pointing out that while indebtedness among farmers is high, Ramanjaneyulu says the institutional credit to agriculture is only around 21%. “Most of the institutional credit goes to landowners and not to the real cultivators who take land on lease and cultivate. It is they who are in deep crisis,” he explains.Here Ramanjaneyulu also points out that once again TRS and Congress are promising to do the loan waiver in one go, which would to around ?20,000 crore. “When the state net income is only around ?90,000 crore and already there are several other demands to be met, we strongly believe that the next government will be forced to resort to the same strategy as the last government of splitting it into instalments and all the problems faced by the farmers will see a repeat. In that situation, loan waiver does not serve the needy farmers. Even if we look at the case of people who are covered under loan waiver, it didn’t benefit them over all the years.” the agricultural scientist explains.However, Lahudas, a tenant farmer in Gudihatnoor of Adilabad, is hopeful that once TRS comes back to power, it will do something to improve his lot. “Tenant farmers are not benefited by the Rythu Bandhu scheme. TRS has now promised us that tenant farmers will also be included in Rythu Bandhu, which will help us,” he says.

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