Land of hope and despair: crop failure and rising debts push farmers to suicides in Andhra

The following article has references to suicide. Please avoid reading if you feel distressed by the subject.

Every morning, 40-year-old Aitamraju Anjamma wakes up to the dreadful prospect of finding moneylenders at her doorstep. “They come every day, without fail,” she says, in a voice trembling with grief and gloom. In the message inbox of her phone are countless reminders from a bank about missed repayment deadlines for agricultural and home loans. How much?, Which bank? she doesn’t know. Such matters used to be handled by her husband, Aitamraju Venkateswarlu, who is no more.

A resident of Rachamallapadu village in Veldurthi mandal of Palnadu district, Anjamma stopped going to agricultural work five years ago owing to her declining health. She doesn’t have any income apart from the pension under the NTR Bharosa scheme received by a relative, who stays with her. This and a sum sent by her brother, a watchman in Hyderabad, keeps fire in the hearth. Though Anjamma herself is eligible for a pension of ₹4,000 under the NTR Bharosa scheme, she is yet to receive any. As of now, she owes a debt of around ₹32 lakh to over 15 people.

It was the same pressure that is believed to have driven Venkateswarlu to end his life on June 11, 2024. He cultivated chilli, cotton and paddy and found himself under a heavy yoke of debt following successive crop failures and fluctuating market prices over the previous three years. 

Since the death of her husband, Anjamma, mother of three children, has spent sleepless nights, dealing with grief and anxiety, which deteriorated her health further. “Currently, except for our house and an acre of land, we don’t have anything,” she says. 

Anjamma’s is not an isolated case. Between January 1, 2014, and February 3, 2025, there were 399 suicides in the region falling within the administrative limits of Palnadu, which was carved out of Guntur district in 2022. All of them are owing to ‘debt’ or ‘loss in cultivation’, showed a Right To Information (RTI) response from the District Crime Records Bureau to an application filed by B. Kondala Reddy of the Rythu Swarajya Vedika (RSV), an organisation working towards ensuring sustainable livelihoods for agricultural communities in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

According to Mr. Kondala Reddy, farmer suicides are rising in the State, and most of them are being reported from the two regions of Palnadu-Bapatla and Kurnool-Anantapur. “Many farmers’ organisations have put the number of total farmer suicides in A.P. in 2024-25 at 300. But the government’s official figure stands at 39, which is a gross underestimation of reality,” he says, pointing to the National Crime Records Bureau data for the State in 2020 and 2021, when 889 and 1,065 people in the farm sector, both farmers and tenant farmers, died by suicide.

According to Palnadu District Agricultural Officer Murali, 119 farmers ended their lives between 2022 and August 2025, and ex gratia was paid in 77 cases; the rest will be covered soon. But it is yet to be known how many families affected by suicides that took place between 2014 and 2021 have received ex gratia.

A team of activists from the Human Rights Forum (HRF), an organisation working on human rights violations in A.P. and Telangana, and RSV visited nine of these families earlier this month. They found that most were tenant and small farmers, owning one or two acres of land and cultivating chilli and cotton. Eight of these families are yet to receive the ex gratia of ₹7 lakh instituted by the Government Order (G.O.) 43. Anjamma’s family, too, has not received the ex gratia.

A mechanism crippled by noncompliance 

According to a G.O. issued on October 14, 2019, a mandal-level committee led by a tahsildar should visit the suicide-affected family and submit a preliminary report within 24 hours to a division-level committee led by the Sub-Collector. The division-level committee should then “complete the verification process and furnish final recommendations for sanction of [the] ex gratia within 7 days.”

Of the eight families that the teams visited and later The Hindu spoke to, only one family said that these official teams visited them. 

As for, Anjamma, days are spent stressing over how to clear her debts. “Even if we put our one-acre land on lease, we won’t get more than ₹9,000 a year,” she says, adding that tenancy rates plummeted over the past few years owing to declining land value, which, in turn, was due to crop failures.

She pins her hopes on her son, pursuing MSc. in molecular biology at Central University of A.P. in Anantapur and her daughter, studying at a government degree college in Guntur. When The Hindu spoke to the son, who was unwilling to be named, he says there is not enough money to pay the laboratory fee of ₹30,000. Passionate about science since childhood, he wants to pursue Ph.D., but financial constraints force him to think about part-time jobs instead. 

The root cause 

Aitamraju Venkateswarlu used to cultivate two commercial crops on seven acres, one, their own, and six taken on lease. Sometimes, when there was enough water, he would cultivate paddy, too. Things were better for Anjamma’s family until three years ago. 

In 2022, prices of a quintal of chilli touched an unprecedented ₹25,000. Buoyed by this, many began cultivating chilli on more acres. After peaking, the rates began to fall. In 2023, when the rates touched ₹15,000, farmers were still hopeful. But then it came crashing down, says Kakani Venkateswarlu, a trader in Guntur. Now, in the chilli market of Guntur, the price stands around ₹10,000-₹12,000. 

Rising input costs, borewell failures, high tenancy rates, repeated pest infestations, erratic rains and non- remunerative prices for cotton and chilli have dealt a body blow to farmers in Palnadu district, the top producer of the red chillies in Andhra Pradesh. 

“Though the government does come up with market Intervention regularly, it does so after the damage has been done. In the case of cotton, the Minimum Support Price (MSP) is available, but not many get it owing to the produce not meeting the quality standards set by the government,” says K. Anuradha, HRF-A.P. executive committee member. 

Chilli, the major horticulture crop of Palnadu, was grown on around 40,000 hectares in 2024-25, down from the 52,016 hectares in 2023-24, as per data available in the District Handbook of Statistics. Horticulture officials attribute the decline to thrips infestation and believe that the area under cultivation may come down further this year.

Sowing of chilli begins in late kharif in Palnadu, from mid-August till September end, and its a costly affair compared to cotton. While per acre expenses, excluding tenancy rate, remain around ₹50,000 for cotton, for chilli, it goes up to ₹2.5 lakh, including tenancy rate (which needs to be paid upfront).

Most farmers are dependent on canals for irrigation, and harvesting begins in January. “In 2021-2022, there was an increase in thrips infestation. Last year, when the district received rains in October, during the flowering stage of chillies, the infestation increased again, causing huge losses for farmers,” says a district official, seeking anonymity.

As for cotton, pink ballworm and other pests make cultivation risky. “Farmers don’t know how to keep the pests away. Due to the infestations, the yield per acre of cotton has come down from 10-15 quintals to 6-7 over the past few years,” says S. Rajamani, principal scientist (cotton), Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University.

“For many of us, chillies are the only hope,” says Nagendra Babu, a farmer from Telukutla in Gurazala,on being asked why they go for chilli. A good chilli crop should yield 20-25 quintals an acre, but farmers can break even only if a quintal fetches a price of ₹15,000 or more, he adds. At Nagendra Babu’s village, the annual tenancy rate is ₹20,000 an acre. If there is a borewell, the rate goes up to ₹30,000.

Nagendra Babu’s brother-in-law, 24-year-old Gundala Anjaneyulu, ended his life on August 17, 2024, after suffering heavy losses in agriculture. He left behind his middle-aged parents, a wife and a four-year-old son.

Anjaneyulu studied till Intermediate second year, worked as an agricultural labourer for a year and got married at the age of 18. “The couple wanted to do farming like the others in the village. So, he took ten acres on lease four years ago, cultivated cotton in seven and chilli on three and ended up with a debt of ₹15 lakh,” says Nagendra Babu, who himself cultivated chilli and cotton on 12 acres for two years and incurred losses.

He, too, has debts of around ₹10 lakh and has now shifted to dairy farming. “We borrow money from so many people. How can we face them,” he says. When asked if he thought of shifting to cities for work, he says: “Farmers cannot live there. They always come back.” Nagendra Babu, who used to work as a salesman in Hyderabad, came back four years ago.

In the single-room house at Indiramma Colony of the village, Anjaneyulu’s parents Siddaiah and Nagendramma live along with their daughter-in-law and grandson. The house, given to them during the tenure of former Chief Minister the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, is in a dilapidated condition. Every time it rains, the ceiling leaks and the floor becomes wet.

These are, however, trivial issues for Nagendramma, steeped as they are in debts. Nagendramma is a farmhand getting between ₹200-₹300 a day, and her husband, Siddaiah, grazes cattle. Their daughter-in-law, too, work as a farmhand. “Even if we work hard all our lives, we still won’t be able to repay the amount,” says Nagendramma, now 45. The three-member committee did not visit their family, she says. 

Access to credit

While officials from the Horticulture Department claim that they educate farmers on the best practices and which medicines to use, farmers say no one tells them what to do or why their crop is getting infested so often.

Asked about crop insurance schemes and crop loans, Anuradha says that usually, not many farmers opt for insurance schemes as they are not farmer-friendly. “Moreover, crop loans are provided only to land owners or to those tenant farmers who have Crop Cultivator Rights Cards (CCRCs),” she says. This forces small farmers to depend on moneylenders who charge exorbitant interest rates.

The CCRC is mandatory for the farmers to access welfare scheme, but a survey conducted by the RSV in 2022 in nine districts of Andhra Pradesh showed that only 364 out of 3,855 tenant farmers received CCRCs. Even among them, only 17% received benefits under the YSR Rythu Bharosa, a scheme launched by the previous YSRCP government. Out of the eight suicide-affected families The Hindu spoke to, none had the card.

The debt cycle

Most often, the debt of the farmer ending his life gets transferred to the women in his family. Many of them take up menial jobs to support their families. One of them, Bandla Rama Devi, a farmer’s widow from Madugula village of Gurazala, works overtime to make ₹20,000 per month from her stitching job. She sold their four acres to clear half the debt. 

She, too, hasn’t received any ex gratia, though it has been 15 months since her husband, Bandla Narayana, died by suicide. “But, I won’t bow down before anybody for financial aid, though my family is rightfully entitled to the aid,” she says. “My children should get an education; they should have a better life. Here, the lives of farmers have no value,” she says. 

(Those having suicidal thought may dial 100 for assistance)