Driven to despair when unseasonal rains damaged his crop of grapes last week, a farmer from Dindori tehsil in Nashik district committed suicide on Monday.
Driven to despair when unseasonal rains damaged his crop of grapes last week, a farmer from Dindori tehsil in Nashik district committed suicide on Monday.
According to reports, Dattatray Ghadwaje, 45, a farmer from Umrale Khurd village, had cultivated three acres of export-quality grapes and his crop had reached the harvesting stage. He had struck a deal with a trader at the rate of Rs 55 per kilo of grapes. The grapes were damaged on the vines by unseasonal rains that lashed the region for two days. As a result, the trader refused to pluck the bunches of grapes and complete the deal.
Ghadwaje had taken a loan for cultivating his land, and was worried about its repayment. Depressed over the situation, Ghadwaje consumed pesticide on Monday morning and ended his life. He was rushed to the rural hospital, to no avail. The tehsildar of Dindori, Mandar Kulkarni, visited the family and has ordered a Panchnama. The police is investigating further.
Meanwhile, agricultural expert Girdhar Patil, who has been working closely with farmers for many years, demanded that the government take firm steps to ensure that no more farmers are struck by the misfortune which claimed Ghadwaje's life.
Ghadwaje was not alone in suffering from the vagaries of changing weather, Patil said. Recently, farmers in some parts of the state had been affected by freak hailstorms. Patil said that the aid provided recently by the state government to hailstorm-affected farmers was insufficient. "The aid given by the government to hailstorm affected farmers in the past is so insufficient that it does not even help recover the production cost," Patil said. Moreover, Patil doubted whether the state had even bothered to check if the aid had reached the right beneficiaries.
Considering that natural calamities hit frequently nowadays, there has to be some kind of 'agro emergency fund', Patil said. But he said this was far from the solution.
"Instead of running to dig a well every time we need water, there has to be some permanent
solution," Patil said.
He said that the rural agricultural economy as a whole needed a revamp; it needed better systems of marketing. He said India's agricultural products needed to be marketed around the world, for which drastic changes in agricultural policy were needed.
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