THE BORE WELL BAWLS


The recent spells of rainfall in Andhra Pradesh cannot bring back the 21 who died witnessing the worst drought this year. Neither will it compensate for the near zero ground water levels and mounting debts, which remain a constant. Shriya Mohan reports.


24/9/2009

In Brahmanapally village, Anantpur district, 350 kilometers from Hyderabad, wealth is measured by how many bore wells are dug by a farmer, not how many of them work. Because if you asked them that, you would see the villagers looking down, shuffling their feet and grinning sheepishly. Brahnamapally, like the rest of Anantpur, has 90 per cent of its land under agriculture but is situated in a rain shadow area that receives the country’s lowest rainfall, after Jaisalmer. This year saw an exceptionally late monsoon. Except for the last two weeks, Anantpur has witnessed the worst drought since people can remember. Over the last two months, 21 farmers killed themselves across the state - each death, an ugly exhibit of the government’s failure to provide an alternative to survive. Anantpur was worst hit with 16 of the suicides taking place in its various villages, one of which was Brahmanapally.
Ravindra Naidu, a 25-year-old boy in Brahmanapally, decided to end his life last month. Ravindra’s parents are still in shock. The sight of their son’s body --- lying sprawled in their terrace at 5:30 that morning, with a strip of insecticide in his hands, with his eyes staring straight into the sunrise --- hasn’t stopped haunting them. Today is a month since his mother has eaten a morsel of food. She says she can’t swallow without crying. Ravindra was a responsible boy. While he let his only brother study in Anantpur, Ravindra himself never studied. His father developed Tuberculosis when he was in 9th grade and there was no one but him to take care of the seven acres of ground nut crops. A year and half ago, Ravindra, like the rest of the village, also decided to risk drilling a bore well. It was a costly affair --- considering no rainfall for the last two years had failed his crops and considering the village’s NREGS didn’t give him more than 20 days of employment. On that day, when he excitedly waited for the slightest sound of water, they told him it was all stone. Ravindra took two loans – both in the name of his father, amounting to rupees four lakh and got an even deeper (650 feet) bore well dug once again. This time, it worked. While spending nearly one lakh rupees on the two bore wells alone, the rest was spent on the crops and on medicine for his ailing father. Except for a Rs 50,000 crop loan from Syndicate bank, his loans were all taken at a 24 per cent rate of interest from several local moneylenders. Sometimes they would threaten him outside, without anybody’s notice, on the consequences of not repaying on time. Ask his father when the loans started to pile and he says, “There is really no beginning. It is a chain. One loan is taken after another to pay off the previous loan. It just keeps continuing. I can’t remember when it all started.” Although nobody knows the sequence of events before they found his body, his mother says, “He killed himself because there was too much pressure on him”.
Each bore well costs Rs 40,000 on average, depending on the depth of the bore. The drilling of bore wells has reached such a ridiculous high that not just in Brahmanapally, but in every part of Anantpur, ground water tables have fallen to abysmal levels. “We have to drill deeper and deeper these days. Earlier, water could be tapped by drilling a bore well at 400 feet, but now it is nothing less than 600, and that too, is not a guarantee,” says Rangamma, who owns 25 acres of land and has drilled 18 bore wells, of which four work. Today, the village has been dug at every possible corner for water, in the pursuit of which, most of Brahmanapally is steeped in debt.
Anantpur collector, Janardhan Reddy is deeply concerned. The pressure of a frenzied media from one end and the state authorities on the other hand has him under constant pressure. “You must realise that Anantpur is a drought prone area and the monsoon months are the hardest,” he clarifies. “Bore wells constitute the primary reason for indebtedness here. The water situation is so desperate that people don’t stop digging until they find water, no matter how expensive it is. Other reasons for taking loans are weddings and crop loans.” So what is the state doing to stop this desperate digging? Two years ago, a law was passed for Anantpur district banning the digging of bore wells without prior permission from the Mandal Revenue Officer (MRO). But nobody in the villages has even heard about this as no penalties have been imposed on those who break it. Government banks refuse to give loans for bore wells, so farmers get their capital by taking a loan under the garb of “farming related reasons” or turn to local moneylenders, both of which, the government can hardly control. Reddy mentions a case of a farmer who drilled 18 bore wells spending seven lakh rupees and all his bore wells were dry without a drop of water. To promote the importance of preserving ground water, Reddy has started a new campaign called ‘No More Bore’ campaign and has used this farmer to drill home the point that drilling a bore well just isn’t worth it. “The month of September has been set as ground water month, to spread public awareness on this issue through discussions, competitions and debate. We have painted our slogan on the walls of every village and people are slowly beginning to understand,” he says hopefully.
So if the government isn’t allowing the drilling, who is? Meet Adinarayana. 45-year-old water diviner, or colloquially, ‘point choonpichhe manishi’, the one who shows points. Adinarayana has never been to a school, and yet, is more respected than most government geologists. We are told much about him from all the villagers of Brahmanapally --- that he has marked points where water can be found for most to dig their bore wells; that he has great powers; and that for every ten points he marks around three “work”. And the rest? “Well, you don’t get better than this anywhere. The geologist from the government is equally accurate. At least people like Adinarayana charge lesser,” defends Narayanappa, another resident. Collector Janardhan Reddy is evidently not pleased, “We are trying hard to stop people from using unscientific ways to tap ground water and claiming themselves to be geologists. We have to make them understand the danger they are causing,” he says.
25 kilometres away in a neighbouring village, Adinarayana is just back from work. Today he marked five points in a few nearby villages. How does he do it? “I didn’t learn it anywhere. It is a power I developed in my childhood. The first point I marked was full of water. I have been practicing for over 20 years,” says Adinarayana. It looks simple. He cuts a branch from the Neem tree that resembles the shape of a handlebar, holds it and keeps walking around the farm area very slowly, testing for different fields of “vibrations”. “Sometimes it suddenly pulls me to a spot. And that’s the point. I can even tell how deep you will have to dig to find water,” he says proudly. Has the government water department objected? “Why would they? I am helping people find water and I am as accurate as them,” he says. And what does he charge? “People pay me anything they like. It isn’t fixed,” he says. From nearby villages like Boparapally, which is 10 kilometers away to as far as Bukapatnam, 50 kilometers away, his fame has spread far and wide. Adinarayana himself has 4 acres of groundnut fields and has one borewell that works. But this drought, even his divine powers couldn’t suck out any water from it.
Anantpur’s Andhra Jyoti office is abuzz with activity. Andhra Jyoti is one of Andhra Pradesh’s leading Telugu newspapers. Ever since the onset of the drought, more than two months ago, they started featuring a daily column called ‘Drought Stories’, bringing stories on the drought from different nooks and corners of the state --- stories of farmers appealing to the state, stories of wild animals from jungles entering human habitations in search of water (only to be found under the wheels of a truck), and stories of farmers killing themselves because of bore well loans. Raghu, 30, is the Sub editor of the Anantpur office. “We are only newspaper giving this issue so much importance. This year has been unusually bad,” he says. Today’s column is the story of a man from Kadappa district (YSR’s native district) who committed suicide a few days ago. Before dying, he wrote a letter to the Chief Minister stating that he is an educated man who is suffering immensely due to the drought. His fields have dried up and his education fetches him nothing. Andhra Jyoti published the letter. Because never has a farmer told the state so much, so directly, before leaving his own body as a display of his desperation. But not all local media have been reporting this. When Tehelka called Sakshi TV, a congress party backed local television channel, after a long drawn discussion with the reporter who claimed all the cases to be ‘false cases’, he finally said, “Since we have a congress party backing, we have been told to not recognise the issue altogether.”
So how many suicides does the government recognise? Last month, late chief minister, YSR had himself admitted to “20 deaths in 40 days” which made headlines in all newspapers, but Reddy is quick to defend the numbers. “Out of the 17 cases in Anantpur that were reported by the local newspapers, 7 were found to be genuine. The other 10 were not farmer suicides,” he clarifies. But Andhra has been in the news before for the same reason. According to NCRBs 2007 report, 1797 farmers committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh, accounting for a 12% increase in suicides in the state compared to 2006. In 2006, when the state saw a surge in farmer suicides, Sonia Gandhi paid a visit to Marthadu, one of the villages in Anantpur that saw the most number of deaths that year. Her visit was to promise the families about the Prime Minister’s relief fund which was granting one lakh fifty thousand rupees for each family --- 50,000 to pay off debtors and one lakh deposited in a joint account of the beneficiary and the tehsildar to be used only for the development of agriculture. Even today, the Andhra Pradesh state government’s Prime Minister’s relief fund gives the same relief package for the families of the suicide victims. However, Gautami Reddy, Block Divisional Officer and member of expert committee on farmer suicides at Anantpur has a different take on why the numbers being recognised by the state are so few. She says, “A lot of these cases are fake. Now that citizens know that there is such a package, even if the person had a normal death, they would make it appear to look like a farmer suicide for the money. It needs careful investigation.”
While it is commonly believed that farmer suicides occur more in small and marginal farmers because of their lack of security or an alternative to survive, the same, surprisingly, holds true for the rich farmer. Vijay Bhaskar Reddy is one such man. Owning 40 acres of farm land, and belonging to the infamously rich Reddy community of Andhra, 33-year-old Bhaskar is a survivor of the 2002 and 2006 drought. In 2002, when the crops failed because of no rainfall, he saw his 26-year-old brother, Vamsi Krishna Reddy and his 23-year-old sister-in-law, Krishnaveni, commit suicide together, leaving their only son five year old son orphaned. When the government recognised it as one farmer suicide (women are not considered farmers and so don’t fall under the category of farmer suicides) and gave Vijay, his legal heir, a compensation of 1.5 lakh only, it didn’t make much of a difference to their indebtedness. Ask him how much his pending loans are and he says, “The bank loans amount to 20 lakh rupees. The outside loans from local moneylenders are a few lakhs.” How many bore wells did he have? “12. Out of which only two work.” Did he get a crop loan waive off from the government? “No, because we are not a Below poverty line (BPL) family.” Does he now have any land in his name? “No. It is all mortgaged in the bank’s name.” Has he considered an alternative way of making money? “No. We are Reddy farmers. We will only deal in land.” Vijay represents the rich farmers of Andhra Pradesh who own huge houses, whose wives wear gold and diamonds, who own tractors and cars, but whose exorbitant levels of indebtedness are always kept secret. If a drought troubles a small farmer, he would only try to find work at a nearby construction site to feed his family, but farmers like Vijay have too much pride to settle for a job that would lower their dignity in the eyes of society. “My brother was the head of the family. He couldn’t stand the debt. I can’t imagine how they could both just die, leaving their child behind. Now I am badly stuck and left with no options but to suffer. I can’t even sell my land for money because it is already in the bank’s name,” he says.
Andhra Pradesh spends hundreds of crores on Agriculture every year, while Anantpur alone spends 100 crores per annum on farmers. In a nutshell, some of the main schemes the farmers in Anantpur are entitled to are the 75 crore budget seed subsidy scheme, where 90 kg of ground nut seeds are given annually at a third of the market price; the 6 crore budget farm mechanisation scheme that allows tools like seed drills, plant protective equipment and sprayers to be sold to the farmers at half the market price; and a crop insurance scheme where Rs 108 per acre, a farmer can insure his crops to protect himself against calamities like droughts. Apart from these was the Rs 555 crore crop loan waive off that was made in 2006 to benefit over three lakh farmers. But Reddy, unfortunately cannot avail these schemes simply because of the class and richness his name automatically gives away. The ironic part is that despite water remaining the core agricultural problem Anantpur suffers from, the state has failed to allot any of its resources for irrigation purposes, without which none of the above schemes would have scope to remotely comfort the farmers. “We have some plans to draw water from the Krishna river in Srisailam which would help irrigate at least five to six acres,” says Collector Janardhan Reddy. But in a district the size of Anantpur, with 36 lakh acres of land to irrigate, it would only be a small pitcher of water to quench an endless thirst.
In Andhra Pradesh, the 2009 drought has brought everyone down to their knees, whether they are the rich or the poor, the dry land owners or the water diviners. “We are planning to open counselling sessions for the farmers and have opened a new toll free number to address their grievances”, says Collector Janardhan Reddy. But suicide, no matter how planned, is still about a moment’s impulse. And one can seldom expect a suicidal attempt to be avoided because of a toll free number. At Sainagar village, Anantpur, Najjar Badsha, 40-year-old farmer says, “If we don’t pay for a while, they (moneylenders) will come and ask for things in the house --- our bullock carts, our animals and slowly start taking away our belongings. But one day they will come and ask me for my wife, like they have done to others. Then, if I don’t kill myself what else will I do?” As we leave, he openly challenges us, “Come back after a month. You will see many of us gone.” While Janardhan Reddy’s expert committee on farmer suicides sit in the collector camp 160 kilometers away, their biggest challenge is to make an indebted farmer see reason to stay alive.