Revealing Vidarbha’s plight: ‘Cotton for my shroud’

Story of debt-ridden Vidarbha farmers in one of the India's richest state, Maharashtra, has been told many times.

Updated on: Mar 11, 2012, 01:48:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan

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Story of debt-ridden Vidarbha farmers in one of the India's richest state, Maharashtra, has been told many times. The burdening figure of quarter of a million farmers buried in the region’s ‘cotton-field graveyard’ since 1995 tells how an agriculturally productive region can turn into a death-trap just because of the government's ill-conceived policies and inaction. But, capturing a disaster spread over almost two decades of time wrap is not easy.

Nandan Saxena and Kavita Behl took on the arduous task in 2009 to tell the world about the 'mute genocide' taking place in white cotton fields of Vidarbha through the lives of three native families. “It gave us a window into drama and despair that forms the wrap and weft of life at Vidarbha,” Saxena said. The documentary talked about the trap of private money lenders and rising cost of growing genetically modified cotton.

The painstaking effort and pro-active narrative on how a farmer lands in the honey trap of investing in BT Cotton got the government’s recognition in 2012. The 45-minute documentary “Cotton of my Shroud” received National Award (Rajat Kamal) for the best investigative film.

Laxman Mohurle (62) of Yavatmal district in Vidarbha region has no idea what “cotton of my shroud’ means and is clueless that a film on their miseries has received a national award. For him, life is in turmoil since his only son, Kisan (38) committed suicide in November last because of failure of his cotton crop.

Kisan succumbed under monetary pressure after banks turned their backs on him and he failed to repay R75,000 loan borrowed from a private money lender at an exorbitant rate. “Crop failure, abysmally low return for his little cotton produce and mounting pressure from the money lender forced him to take the drastic step,” Mohurle recalled.

The British had identified Vidarbha as India’s cotton belt because of its close proximity to Mumbai, from where bales could be transported to Manchester in United Kingdom. It remained so till early 1990 when the government introduced BT Cotton. Farmer distress started and suicides became rampant in the second part of the decade.

Nobody can exemplify the horrifying transition better than 81-year-one year-old Bapuraoji Gurnule, who received Maharashtra government’s “Krushibhushan award” in 1987 and lost his 33-year-old son to the cotton grave-yard a few years back.

“Till early 1990s, everything was all right. Suddenly, the government suggested use of the American BT cotton for increasing yield. Once used, the land became unfit for using Indian variety of cotton. In a way the farmer was trapped,” he claimed.

'Cotton for my shroud' amplify the transition and Saxena, a former television journalist, successfully highlights the farmer despair it had caused through their voices impressing the national award jury, which found the documentary an outstanding for its ground reporting.

The voices were backed by testimonies from scientists to drive home the point that Vidarbha farmers are victims of government’s faulty paradigm of development. “One cannot blame only BT Cotton. It is a complex multi-faceted problem with no one stop solution,” said Abhijit Sen, agriculture economist and member of the planning commission.

The 45 minutes of catches a part of the problem and Saxena agrees that 45 minutes is not enough to tell a story of over a million poor aggrieved farmers."Will this documentary bring any change in our life?" asks Mohurle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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