Can they dare to dream?
In the course of our work at Kisan Mitra, we have met many farmers’ families in distress; especially many landless tenant farmers with huge amounts of debts taken at high interest rates and struggling to make ends meet, but the above family and their problem posed to be something I have never encountered before. The old man in the picture is a 58-year-old farmer from Venkatraopet village in Luxettipeta mandal, Mancherial district. The lady wearing spectacles speaking to me is his wife who is around 45 years old. Like many tenant farmers, they don’t own any piece of land and hence take a couple of acres for lease and cultivate cotton. Owing to consistent crop losses due to bad weather and other pest infestation issues, they incurred debts amounting to 4 lakhs which they had taken from local moneylenders at the rate of 2% per month (they aren’t eligible for crop loans from banks because they don’t own any agricultural land). The family is visibly anguished especially the man and it has also started to take a toll on his health and he has been suffering from hypertension and BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo) and Anaemia for quite some time now. Adding to their agony is their anxiety related to their only son, 28 years old (they have 3 daughters who are married and settled) who is still studying in Hyderabad and isn’t married yet. The social stigma surrounding their grown-up son’s condition where he is still not “settled” yet and the questions they face from their neighbours and relatives, day in and out is also a major cause of their concern. Unable to see them in that condition and wanting to understand their son’s side of the story, we tried reaching him over a call and were pleasantly surprised to learn about his story.
A student from a Telugu medium government school and college, he managed to study engineering in Hyderabad. He later got an admission for M.Tech in IIT but he couldn’t afford to pay the fees so joined Osmania University and did his masters while taking tuitions to help his parents in paying his fees. He also worked for a while to procure enough money to fund his PhD in an IIT and recently got an admission to one of the IITs for a PhD program with a stipend of 25000 rupees per month, the major part of which he wants to send home to help them repay their loans. The conversation with him was a revelation of sorts about the unfortunate state of many such underprivileged yet bright children of these farmers in distress. Despite having the talent, the will to work hard and the ability to make it big in life, they get stuck in the rigmarole of complications because of lack of support from the system sometimes and most other times the pressure to start working as soon as possible to be able to support their families financially and help in clearing their debts especially in the case of tenant farmers with absolutely no stable financial resources or support from the system to fall back on. These dire conditions push most of them into giving up their dreams and compromising on their ambitions to settled down for a life of inadequacy and poverty.
We are glad that in this case the boy didn’t give up and we also managed to convince and counsel the parents by giving them reassurance about the glorious future their son has in store. The parents seemed to be relieved and their son also thanked us for bridging the gap between him and his parents and for instilling faith in his abilities.
It definitely is a rocky road ahead for the boy and his family given all the constraints especially financial, but with his strong will, we are sure the boy is going to fulfil all his dreams and also clear off the debts incurred by his parents in no time. What needs to be seen is how the system can support the farming communities, especially the distressed landless tenant farmers in making their lives slightly easier.
