Nobody in Sangrail village in Saharanpur really knows the truth behind his death or if 46-year-old Narendar Singh Saini committed suicide since he saw no way out of his mounting debts.

But he died in a sugarcane field owing to which the death of a lone marginal farmer in a remote village in UP, which might otherwise have passed unnoticed, has been catapulted to the centre of the sugarcane agitation that has hit the western parts of Uttar Pradesh. Farmers and unions took to the streets and burnt sugarcane produce near Muzaffarnagar, Bijnaur, Bulandshahr, and Baghpat to register their protest against the State Advised Prices of Rs 170 per quintal announced on October 23.

He had a wife suffering from tuberculosis, three daughters to marry off to add to which the crop failed on account of the drought. Narendar allegedly killed himself because of his accumulated debts but the farmers here hope that in his death he could set them free from their own debt trap. Most farmers in Rangail and nearby villages grow sugarcane and there isn’t a single farmer in the village that isn’t buried under debt, Mangeram Saini, the village pradhan, said. So when the government announced the State Advised Price for sugarcane which was much below their expectations, it led to an agitation that engulfed large parts of the state.

On November 1 unions even blocked a train laden with 26,000 quintals of sugar imported from Brazil as a mark of protest. In Bareilly, at a recent farmers’ Mahapanchayat, thousands of farmers showed up along with the leaders of the unions — the Bhartiya Kisan Union, and Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Union.

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