New Delhi - More than 30 debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide in India's western state of Maharashtra, a news report said Sunday.
The suicides by cotton farmers were reported from Yavatmal, a district in the eastern region of Vidarbha that has been facing an farming crisis over the past years, the NDTV network reported.
The state government was yet to confirm the suicides which news outlets said took place over the past 10 days in the area located about 600 kilometres north-east of state capital Mumbai.
The Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS), an NGO working for the cause of peasants said farmers in the region - that often faces droughts - were unable to pay back banks and local moneylenders due to crop failures and falling prices.
'There was a recovery notice from the bank. Then there were local too be repaid. My son even went to sell our pair of oxen but there were no buyers,' Baba Tekam a cotton farmer whose son Laxman committed suicide, told NDTV.
VJAS president Kishor Tiwari claims that amid an economic downturn banks and local moneylenders have started pushing farmers for repayment.
A majority of the farmers' suicides have been reported from six of Vidarbha's districts, now infamous as a 'suicide prone' zone.
According to government statistics, more than 180,000 farmers, the vast majority deeply have committed suicide since 1997 across India.
Besides Maharashtra, the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh report nearly two-thirds of the farm suicides in the country.
In 2007, more than 16,600 farmers chose to end their own lives. While down slightly from the 17,000 suicides the year before, the trend continues.
The farm suicides are an embarrassment for the Indian National Congress party-led government which has been in power since 2004 promising to relieve the rural population's suffering.
Half of government aid also ends up in corrupt officials' pockets, local observers say.
Populist measures like cancelling small farmers' bank debts worth 13 billion failed to get to the root of the problem because the debt with private loan sharks, which amounted to an estimated 88 per cent of the loans granted in 2008, were not affected.
