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Punjab suicides cast shadow on polls

by Red Brick | 3 years, 1 month(s) ago

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Tags: cast, Polls, Punjab, Shadow, suicides

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Guest10314417

i want to ask about the cas kakayzai. what kind of people are they????
Report (0) (0) | 2 years, 10 month(s) ago
zarnigar

Mandip Kaur, a 29-year-old housewife from a farming family in southern Punjab, guards her husband round the clock. "I fear he may commit suicide," she says in broken Hindi. Almost every village in Punjab has witnessed a suicide in their once-prosperous farming families and it is a major issue in the general election. Ms Kaur's 35-year-old husband, Lakhbir Singh, a small farmer with a two-acre land holding, is a strong and neatly dressed man. He shows no sign of irritation or discomfort when we meet him in the village of Boparai Khurd in Barnala, about 500km (300 miles) north of Delhi. Each year before the harvest, the small farmers of Punjab, who make up nearly 85% of the state's farming community, borrow from local rural moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates to meet production costs, including fertilisers and electricity for irrigation. Commodity prices are plummeting in the international market... and farmer suicides may increase in coming months Bernard D'Mello, deputy editor, "[Lakhbir] has a loan of more than 700,000 rupees ($15,000), which he cannot repay," says Ms Kaur. Defaulting on payment increases the rates of interest and a farmer is publicly humiliated in the local panchayat (self-governing rural body) if he fails to pay up. "His elder brother, my father, committed suicide more than a year ago, as his loan had accumulated up to $20,000," says 15-year-old Jasbir, who discovered her father's body. "I do not think I can ever repay the whole amount," Lakhbir confesses. The Bhartiya Kisan Union-Ekta, (BKU-United), one of the largest farmers' unions in Punjab, is urging its members not to vote in the election if they feel that none of the parties is addressing their needs.
Report (0) (0) | 3 years, 1 month(s) ago