small farmers in india:
"Banks are turning the screws on hard-up farmers, sending them to jail. Mind you, these are farmers in drought-hit regions with no crop and no capacity to pay. The same banks won't touch big industrialist defaulters who owe them crores. But farmers owing a few thousand rupees go to jail." Till recently, the website of the A.P. Debt Recovery Tribunal listed some 200 names of VIPs, industrialists, contractors, and politicians owing over Rs.1,000 crore to the banks. The money was not recovered but the site seems to have vanished.
(...) In other respects, Mr. Nallappa Reddy's story is the same as that of millions of other farmers. As input costs shot up and bank credit declined in the past decade, he incurred heavy losses. As "water, electricity and other costs rose, things got worse." Then the water ran out. "I sank 32 borewells in ten acres within four or five years. All of them failed." This mandal shot to fame in 2004 when, desperate for water, farmer Chandrashekar Reddy sank four borewells in a graveyard linking it to his fields with an 8-km pipeline. (July 18, 2004.) He has since died. Ironically, a couple of those wells now yield some water, after their owner has himself gone to the grave.
(...) "The government is not interested in us," says Sainath Reddy, a nephew of the man who sank borewells in the graveyard. "They want corporate agriculture. We are a nuisance in the way. I tell you, those you wish well, ask them to stay away from agriculture. Don't even wish it on your enemies."