Yavatmal, India – Like everyone around him, Vithal Rathod was excited about what the future held for him and his village when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India on May 26, 2014.
Just two months earlier, on March 20 that year, Modi chose the 45-year-old farming village of Dabhadi from among more than 15,500 villages in the Vidarbha region of western India’s Maharashtra state to launch his raising awareness for the country’s farmers. The visit was important for Modi, who at the time had his eye on the Prime Minister’s presidency, to be able to reach the 65 percent of India’s population that is dedicated to agriculture.
During his visit to Dabhadi, Modi drank tea with farmers like Rathod, visited village farms and promised an end to the death and despair that had long haunted the largely rural and impoverished part of Maharashtra state. A lack of adequate irrigation, erratic weather patterns and fluctuating global prices for cotton – the main crop grown there – have left farmers suffering repeated losses and finding themselves in debt. The resulting frustration led more than 9,000 farmers to commit suicide between 2001 and 2014.
Modi came and said what the farmers wanted to hear. “Your pain, your struggle and your problems will force me to do something good,” he told Rathod and the thousands who gathered to listen to him. “I want to bind myself to this promise, I want to talk to experts and find solutions so that no poor farmer has to kill themselves,” he said.
Rathod returned home peacefully to his family of five and tried to put his recurring agricultural losses behind him. He had a one-hectare farm, not far from where Modi spoke.
But the following year, Rathod’s losses increased and his optimism waned. In 2015, Rathod became a statistic: he hanged himself to death from the roof of his house, close to the main road leading to Dabhadi village, after another year of crop failures, making his debt 120 thousand rupees. ($1,440) impassable.
Rathod was not the only one to feel disappointed. Ten years after Modi’s visit, his promise appears to have crumbled – even as India’s prime minister once again campaigns for re-election, this time for a third term.
Data obtained by this correspondent shows that the number of farmer suicides in the region has increased in the decade that Modi has been in power, compared to the previous 10 years when the Congress party, now in opposition, governed the country.
Between January 2004 and December 2014, 9,671 farmers died by suicide. This number rose to 10,122 in the period January 2015 to December 2023, according to information gathered from the Amravati Divisional Commissioner in Vidarbha, which oversees the administration of five of the country’s most suicide-affected districts: Amravati, Yavatmal, Buldhana, Akola and Washim. The real number of agricultural suicides in the region under Modi is even higher – since the prime minister came to power in May 2014.
On average, between 2004 and 2014, each year this region would record an average of 879 farmer suicide deaths. Since 2015, this number has increased to 1,125 suicides per year on average – or three farmers taking their lives every day.
The paradox of Maharashtra, the country’s richest state, where Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power locally for most of the last decade while also serving as the nerve center of the country’s agrarian crisis, has only deepened in the last decade.
Now, as India’s national elections take place, anger over failed promises is visible in agricultural markets across the region – some of which vote on Friday, April 26.
Nowhere more so than in Dabhadi itself.
Schemes that lead nowhere
In the Rathod family, nine years after the suicide of the family’s main breadwinner, the family’s struggles have remained static – despite the Modi government’s schemes that are meant to benefit farming families like theirs.
Rameshwar, 25, Rathod’s son, had to abandon his studies after his father’s death. Instead, Rameshwar has been doing what his father did – making the most of his one-hectare farm while falling deeper into debt.
Last year, he sowed cotton on his farm, but unexpectedly heavy rains destroyed his crops. “I expected 40 quintals [4 tonnes] of cotton production, but ended up getting only 5 quintals [500kg or 1,100 pounds],” says Rameshwar, standing outside the room where his father hanged himself.
He turned to the Modi government’s flagship scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), a crop insurance scheme aimed at compensating farmers for such losses. The scheme aims to “provide comprehensive insurance coverage against crop failure, thereby helping to stabilize farmers’ income,” according to the initiative’s website.
A back of the envelope showed that his losses were close to 235,000 rupees ($2,815). He applied for insurance money but received only 10,000 rupees ($120), an amount determined based on local authorities’ estimate of the damage his farm suffered.
Putting on a brave face, he hoped that the next crop he sowed, wheat, would help him recover his losses. But in March this year, a hail storm in the region destroyed almost half of its permanent harvest. He once again requested compensation under the PMFBY. A month later, Rameshwar is still waiting.
Like his father, Rameshwar is now heavily in debt. His father was impressed with Modi, but he was not. Rameshwar will support the opposition parties in these polls.
Many other people in his village had a similar reversal of feelings.
A change of heart
Narendra Dabhane, former head of Dabhadi village, used to be “so fascinated by Modi that I would rebuke those who criticized him,” he says, sitting in the courtyard of his village home.
“I used to tell people that he is a man sent by God to help us,” says Dabhane, with an embarrassed smile. “I kept thinking that our village would become a paradise, now that the PM had made such emphatic promises.”
However, just a few months after Modi came to power, Dabhane began to feel betrayed.
Modi, in his speech, proposed what appeared to be a revolutionary idea, what he called the “5F formula, from farm to fiber, to fabric, to fashion, to foreign” – the idea that its cotton production could be converted in ready-made clothes right here in Vidarbha. The result would be the creation of factories, so that farmers’ children could be employed. The clothes would then be exported around the world. That was the dream Dabhadi was sold to.
None of that happened. Dabhane is not aware of any such supply chains being developed – her two sons had to migrate to neighboring districts to get jobs.
Last year, Dabhane sowed cotton on his 1.2-hectare farm on the outskirts of the village. Much of his crop was damaged by the rains and the rest was sold at 6,800 rupees per quintal ($81 per 100 kilograms) of cotton. His earnings are “less than what I made from my cotton 10 years ago,” he said.
Government data shows there has been a 74 percent increase in the state-mandated support price for medium fiber cotton of 3,800 rupees ($46) in 2015-16 at 6,620 rupees ($79) in 2024-25.
But many farmers insist that traders rarely pay attention to these prices. And Dabhane points to what these data do not reveal.
“All the inputs that go into the farm have become exorbitantly expensive,” he said. “A bag of fertilizer that cost us 500 rupees [$6] 10 years ago, now it costs almost 1,700 rupees [$20],” he said. “We are also paying [Modi government-introduced] Goods and Services Tax on everything from pesticides to tractors,” he said.
Like Rathod, Dabhane has also suffered heavy losses twice in recent months, with its cotton and wheat crops failing due to bad weather. But unlike Rathod, who received at least a measly Rs 10,000, Dabhane received nothing, he said.
All this meant that while Modi in February 2016 had said If he “dreamed” that farmers’ incomes would “double” by 2022, farmers like Dabhane saw their real incomes decline.
From being a supporter of Modi, Dabhane has now turned into a fierce critic. In February this year, when Modi visited Yavatmal district, under which Dabhadi falls, Dabhane and a few others put up banners listing 16 promises that they said Modi made to them in his 2014 speech in the village.
“We even made black chai that day,” he says, laughing, in response to Modi’s famous Chai Pe Charcha (Chats about Chai) campaign. During his 2014 election campaign, Modi – who says he used to sell tea or chai at a railway station when he was young – helped out at campaign events over cups of tea to highlight those humble beginnings. Local police, he said, arrested him for the protest and released him after Modi left.
The crisis has affected not only small farmers like Dabhane, but also many others who are ambitious and trying to make agriculture a more sustainable source of livelihood.
Prithviraj Pawar, 43, owns two hectares (five acres) and has leased another six hectares (15 acres) so he can grow crops such as soybeans and wheat. Last year, Pawar’s two-hectare soybean crop suffered severe losses, with its yield falling from the expected 25 quintals to just 12 quintals and with losses exceeding 60,000 rupees ($720). “The insurance plan only gave me 11,000 rupees [$132]which did not even remotely cover my expenses, leaving aside my losses.”
Pawar has a unique bond with Modi – he now farms on lease the farm where Modi held his 2014 event. This year, however, the farm is largely dry and the wheat harvest stunted due to the hailstorm in March that also destroyed Rameshwar’s harvest.
These lived experiences, coupled with the Modi government’s checkered record in dealing with farmers – from the introduction of three controversial new laws to regulate Indian agriculture in 2020, to repeated instances of police violence against protesting farmers – have left many in Vidarbha were suspicious of the government’s intentions. .
For his part, Modi has repeatedly tried to reach out to the region’s farming community. He has already held three public meetings in the region, including one in neighboring Wardha district on April 19, where supposedly blamed the opposition Congress as responsible for the “long-standing challenges faced by farmers in the country”.
But many like Dabhane and Rathod, and others across the region, remain unconvinced and embittered. For them, new speeches will not erase old betrayals.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
