Bundelkhand: Everybody Loves A Good Pre-Election Drought

With UP polls approaching, political parties once again come courting Bundelkhand farmers, 400 of whom have committed suicide in the past year. 

- Raul Irani

There is a barren land where Amaan Chamar, 65 years old, had a field. Last year was not good, but he still managed to get some wheat growing. Now, when it is time for the rabi crop, he has not sown anything because it is pointless. Farmers richer than him have got some seeds sown on their own tracts of land, but no one is sure whether anything will grow. There is no water. Local ponds, which supplied water, have gone dry and bore wells are too expensive for farmers like him. Chamar is from Rajpura village, 60 km east of the city of Jhansi. The region is Bundelkhand,

blighted by three consecutive droughts, hailstorms and unseasonal rains, and facing a severe agrarian crisis. Besides Jhansi, Lalitpur, Mahoba, Banda, Jalaun, Hamirpur and Chitrakoot form the Uttar Pradesh part of the Bundelkhand region. People here are impoverished, and the drought is killing them. In the last one year, more than 400 farmers have committed suicide in the area. The official tally from April 2003 to June 2015 stands at 3,500.

Chamar didn’t have to kill himself. He says his whole family would have just starved to death if his son, who used to help him in farming, had not left for Noida to work as a daily wage labourer. That still doesn’t keep his livestock from dying because without any crops, fodder has to be purchased and its prices have skyrocketed in recent times. In his village, you don’t see many young men. They have all left to work as labourers in nearby Jhansi, the state capital Lucknow or Delhi-NCR. A survey by a local NGO Pravas estimates that 6.2 millionpeople have left Bundelkhand in the last 10 years. “Every day, around 6,000 people, mostly farmers, migrate. You go and check the construction sites in Delhi NCR. Every third labourer is from Bundelkhand,” says Ashish Sagar, a social activist from Banda.