#KarnatakaElections: Has the farmer been wooed?

Life has been tough for Shivamma Gowda (28) since her husband committed suicide five months ago.

She has had to find employment in a garment factory to take care of her three children. This means a daily two-hour commute from her village Dhanguru, in Malavalli taluk, to the outskirts of Bangalore for an eight-hour shift. She has to stitch 100 pieces of clothing per hour failing which she’d be pulled up by a vigilant supervisor. All this for Rs 6,000 a month, which is barely sufficient to keep the house running and pay back the debt her husband had acquired.

Her troubles don’t seem apparent – she smiles often, looks radiant and younger than her age – and speaks matter-of-factly about the circumstances leading up to her husband’s death. “He had borrowed about Rs 2 lakh from private money lenders, they would often come to our house and scream and shout at him for failing to repay them. He went to the farm one day and didn’t come back till late evening. When we went looking for him, we saw him lying unconscious. He had gulped pesticide.”

Shivamma hasn’t received any state aid yet and she’s not very hopeful of any help. When you ask her who she’d like to vote for on May 12, she says elections are a giant headache. “Party workers will come and force us to vote,” she says. Her neighbour says they will be offered Rs 200 and a saree.

The Mandya district has seven Assembly constituencies – Malavalli (where Shivamma lives), Maddur, Melkote, Mandya, Srirangapatna, Nagamangala and Krishnarajpet – and is considered a Janata Dal (Secular) stronghold. The dominant Vokkaligas in the region have traditionally supported the party.

Unlike Shivamma, Lokesh Gowda says he will vote for the JD(S). He considers the party chief, HD Kumaraswamy, a messiah for farmers and has a good opinion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Kumaraswamy will do a lot for us. When my cousin committed suicide he gave the family Rs 50,000. He cares about farmers,” he says.

JD(S) is a favourite among many in the village of Dhanguru in Malavalli taluk.

Lokesh is primarily into sericulture and water is a constant woe since the worm feeds on a crop that is water-intensive. Most of the farmers in fact take loans for sinking borewells which can cost up to Rs 70,000.

Lokesh says he invests Rs 20,000 every month in rearing of silkworms and, if all goes great, makes about Rs 30,000. That is a rare occurrence though – prices have crashed from about Rs 450 per kg of silk cocoon to about Rs 250, he says. Lokesh, too, has a debt of Rs 4 lakh but says he can’t kill himself like his cousin did.

Lokesh next to his farmland.

Over at the residence of Chikkamma, who committed suicide in 2015, her mother and son are happy with the compensation provided by the Congress government – Rs 5 lakh. The son would have been given a government job if he was literate. Chikkamma jumped into a nearby well that is now dry. She had borrowed Rs 3 lakh from various private money lenders and self-help groups to sink a borewell and make a house.

Chikkamma’s son holds her portrait.

Her neighbour Pavitra Nagaraju has about five acres of land and lists some schemes to explain why she will vote for the Congress – Anna Bhagya (free rice), Aarogya Bhagya (free healthcare) and zero per cent loans of up to ₹3 lakh for farmers being some of them. “The Congress government has done work for us, so we will vote for them instead of voting for someone who is only claiming he would do something for us.”

Hers is a reasonably happy story in a state where two to four farmers kill themselves every day.

Under the Congress’ tenure, 3,515 farmers committed suicides, while the number was 1,125 in the previous government. Agriculture in the state is heavily dependent on the southwest monsoon. While only 26.5 per cent of the sown area (30,900 km²) is under irrigation, 64.60 per cent of the total geographical area is under cultivation. In 2012 and 2016, the state faced its worst droughts. In just between April 2016 and March 2017 as many as 821 farmers committed suicide.

The agrarian distress is evidently not restricted to Mandya but extends to the northernmost parts of Karnataka in Bidar district.

Manjunathgowda Hanumanthgowda Sanamani (35) owned four acres of land in Kundagol Panchayat, Dharwad, and killed himself in 2016 by hanging himself. He had taken Rs 1.5 lakh from banks and Rs 18 lakh from money lenders. His brother Channaveeragowda Sanamani says subsequent crop failure due to drought and personal expenditure like sisters’ marriages forced Manjunathgowda to commit suicide.

He had no other way to survive but to take a loan to meet his basic needs. Government banks gave him limited loan and taking loan from the bank was not easy, so he approached money lenders and big farmers. “Since our land is dependent on monsoon, we run the risk of losing all our effort if it does not rain. Losses pile up and so do personal expenditures,” Channaveeragowda says.

As a relief to farmers like him, the government last year announced crop loan waiver of up to Rs 50,000 of over 22 lakh farmers from cooperative banks. Shankar Ambali, vice-president of Raitha Sena Karnataka, a non-government organisation focussed on farmers’ welfare, says this has helped only 20 per cent of farmers since most have taken loans from other sources.

“Compensation after the suicide is not enough to help farmers. It is a wrong practice. Instead, the government should try to abate suicides by providing facilities. Another promise made by the government was to ensure a good price for the produce, but the Agricultural Price Commission of the state has not been able to deliver. Today, onion growers are struggling to sell their goods. Instead of helping farmers, the government is trying to divide farmers in the name of caste.”

He adds that the one thing that has worked is the Krishi Bhagya programme for construction of ponds. “It has helped with rainwater conservation.”

The Siddaramaiah government will hope that the attention it has lavished on farmers – which some have termed “unbridled populism” – will reap its benefits on May 15 when the results are announced. But for some like Shivamma, elections mean very little since no government can change her daily reality. “I’ll just press some button or the other and get it over with,” she says.

(Elisabeth Mani helped with interpretation from Kannada to English and Lakshmi Bagve and Manjunath Somaraddi provided inputs for this story. They work with 101 Reporters.)