Two farmers have taken their own lives since Friday in south-central Maharashtra’s Beed district, about 400 km from Mumbai. However, with the local administration contending that the deaths aren’t a direct fallout of debt-repayment pressure, even compensation for the bereaved families from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund seems unlikely.

This runs sharply against the recommendations of a government-ordered report published in late January. The Indira Gandhi Institute of Developmental Research, which probed farmer suicides in Maharashtra, said that the state should—apart from reforming rural credit structures to extending counselling services at the primary health centre level, among other measures—alter its inflexible compensation policies to extend relief to all suicide households.

Subhash Jhagte, sarpanch of Nimbangaon-Chobha where one of the suicides took place—the village’s third in a year—too said by viewing each case through the narrow prism of debt from a formal institution, the state was failing to provide both short-term and long-term relief measures to tackle the agrarian crisis sweeping farming households (see box).

In Nipan Takli of Majalgaon taluka, jowar farmer Sukhadev Shinde (65) consumed pesticide early on Monday, just hours before Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil announced in the Assembly that he would create a special cell in the CID to investigate complaints against moneylenders.

On Tuesday afternoon, when the paper visited the Shinde family, government officials had yet to visit and enquire why Shinde may have taken this extreme step.

Talking to The Indian Express, Sukhadev’s son Rameshwar, a barber in Beed, said his father was driven to kill himself after losing 4.5 acres of land to ‘‘a sahukar’’, Shivaji Dalvi. Dalvi is also Sukhadev’s son-in-law.

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