Farmer relief package not working

New Delhi: Vidharbha was in the news for farmers driven to suicide by high interest debts and falling prices. Now floods in the same region have washed away hopes of a recovery.

The Prime Minister has announced a relief of Rs 400 crore for flood hit Maharashtra.

However, the Rs 3,750 crore relief package announced by him for Vidharba is yet to have an impact.

And the recent floods might just cripple an already fragile agrarian economy.

Suicide hit Vidharba is staring at crop loss again, but this time it's not due to the lack of water but excess of it.

Fields under water, crops washed away. Yavatmal district is the worst hit with over one lakh hectares under water. And farmers would have depend on yet another relief package to bail them out.

Says a farmer, "Our village has been submerged, all our crops and cattle have been lost."

And it's not as if the relief packages have made much of a difference.

• The Prime Minister had announced a relief package worth Rs 3,750 crore on July 1. By the end of July, 84 more farmers had taken their lives.
• In December last year, Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh announced a package worth Rs 1,075 crore. In that month alone, there were 72 suicides, all linked to agricultural debt.
• Some of the ongoing development schemes like Drip Irrigation have been scaled up from a budget of Rs 23 crore to Rs 52 crore.
• Interest waiver worth Rs 712 crore is a new component.
• Vidharba got Rs 3 crore from the PM's relief fund too.

None of these figures mean much to Shila Devi, whose husband and son both killed themselves.

"The loan kept on increasing, crops failed and we couldn't repay the loan and got a notice from the people who had lent us the money," says she.

The National Comm on Farmers had recommended simple steps including a hike in the price of cotton and increased import duties and low rates of interest for loans.

However, government after government chose to ignore the recommendations.

The relief packages had left the root of the agrarian crisis - rsing costs and falling prices, farm credit left to local money lenders and the uncertainities of the monsoon and the market - all untouched.

India's economist Prime Minister may have pulled the country out from complete bankruptcy when he was the finance minister, but it seems he has not yet found the right cure for the malady which afflicts the debt-ridden Indian farmer.

(With inputs from Bhaskar Mehre in Yavatmal)