His clothes remind me of him,” wails Leelabai, clutching a bundle of clothes in front of the dilapidated structure she calls home, as younger sister Kalabai wipes away her tears.

In front of their hut, lay a vast, barren patch of land. On this one-acre plot in Moundhala, on the Vidarbha-Marathwada border, their brother Kashinath Dagdu Waghmare (38) worked for more than 22 years to make both ends meet. But, finally, the debt-ridden farmer ended his life on the first morning after the Centre’s loan waiver announcement.

Although Kashinath’s loan burden was just Rs 10,000, a waiver would not have helped much. He was deep in debt. “He had taken Rs 5,000 from the Bank of Maharashtra a few years ago. The amount had gone up to Rs 10,000. He also used to borrow from others, we don’t know from whom and how much. He never told us that,” says his 75-year-old father Dagdu.

Kashinath is the third farmer in the village who has committed suicide in the past five years. The answer to their woes is not a waiver: they need better irrigation, a good price for their produce and some kind of a back-up job.

Kashinath lived with wife Kamal, 35, son Dnyaneshwar, 16, and daughters Pushpa, 12, and Sneha, 4, in his farm hut that has cotton stalks for walls and a thatched roof riddled with innumerable holes.

Unlike the rest of Vidarbha, Moundhala has a percolation tank that provides irrigation to 50 per cent of the farmers, enabling them to get two crops in a year. But the area received scant rainfall the last season, leaving the tank completely dry.

... contd.