Welfare and Woe

In Telangana, many of the marginalised who need support the most have not been able to tap into the benefits of a slew of government welfare schemes

- Anisha Reddy

DRIVING through vast swathes of cotton fields flanking either side of the Hyderabad-Nagpur National Highway is a small, barely noticeable board which welcomes one to Sadashivpet Mandal of Sangareddy district in Telangana. That’s around where, Chikkamma, one of the many surviving widows of tenant farmers in the region, lives out her despondent years. Chikkamma’s husband, Baliah, once grew paddy in their 22-acre field. Chikkamma still stays in her small house, but it has stopped being her home ever since her husband died by suicide after failing to pay back Rs 50,000 to a moneylender. “He died two years ago. We are now saddled with a debt of around Rs 27 lakhs,” says Chikkamma, sitting on the threshold of her one-room house with chipped white walls—the same walls that were once filled with the echoes of her complete family.

Like Baliah, one in every three farmers in Telangana is a tenant farmer, according to a door-to-door survey conducted by Rythu Swarajya Vedika (RSV), an independent farmers’ organisation in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Its finding takes the projected total number of tenant farmers in the state to 2.2 million, double the National Sample Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) official, but seemingly conservative estimate. Despite their large numbers, the Telangana government has refused to recognise them as farmers, denying them benefits from any of the state’s farmer-related schemes, including the flagship Rythu Bandhu. This steadfast refusal to include tenant farmers in the scheme appears to be one the key reasons for disenchantment among the grouping towards the incumbent BRS government.