As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced Rs 3,750-crore package for Vidarbha farmers on Saturday, hundreds of kilometres away in a tiny village Akolekati, nearly 15 km north of Solapur, 2,500 people — all farmers— are fighting a losing battle against moneylenders. Having borrowed heavily from these private players to finance their cash crops, almost all these farmers have now fallen into a debt trap; some of them having lost their farms have even taken to working in other fields.

A couple of months ago, this village also witnessed its first suicide when Goverdhan Vithal Patil hanged himself after he failed to repay a debt of Rs 3 lakh that he had borrowed from between a private moneylender and the local cooperative bank.

While a few farmers sold their land to repay the debt, Patil did not even have that choice of selling his onion and sugarcane farm. ‘‘Even if we had sold our 4-acre farm, we would not have been able to repay the debt,’’ Patil’s wife Satyashila said. Now, she survives on her son Bapu’s salary of Rs 1,800 a month at a private company.

Grapes, onions and sugarcane are the major produce from this area and farmers take loans from moneylenders. ‘‘We take loans hoping to repay it when we make profits. But it never goes by plan. We get squeezed between uncertainty in prices of the cash crops and steep labour charges,’’ Dhananjay Lamkane, a sugarcane grower, said.

For instance, the Patils paid Rs 1,700 to the field worker to cultivate onion and they got a mere Rs 1,250 for 50 quintals — Rs 25 per quintal. ‘‘Getting loans from private moneylenders is easy,’’ Lamkane, who has taken Rs 1.5 lakh from a private moneylender and Rs 1.5 lakh from Vikas Cooperative Bank, said.

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