A young couple of farmers we met on the road to the village of Chalegowdan.

Srinivas (35) ploughs the family land plot before planting sugarcane in the village of Hulivana. “I am scared of taking loans”, explained his brother Prasana while we watched the work, “so we don't have any debt yet. We have a well, without it we wouldn't be here, but water is always scarce so I might have to borrow one lakh (100,000 rupees, about 1,300 euros) to dig another well.”

Kamalamma (55), a day labourer, harvests sugarcane in the village of Madhar Halli. She is paid 2 rupees (about 0.02 euros) per bundle of sugarcane, and in a day manages to earn 200 rupees. “But at least we always take some money home. The farmer can make much more, but he can also loose everything if the crop fails.”

A farmer's house near the village of Chikkamandhgere.

Sugarcane ready to be harvested in the fields of Karadakere.

An irrigation channel from the Krishna Sagara dam runs dry on a hot day in July, the middle of the rain season. The Mandya district is supposed to be irrigated from the dam but as the monsoon becomes unreliable and the rains diminish every year, there simply isn't enough water to irrigate all the farmed areas.

A jaggery factory in Hulivana. Jaggery is a traditional product of sugarcane, made boiling the sugarcane juice until in turns into a sweet, concentrated paste that is used to produce many Indian delicacies or is exported abroad.

Basvegowda (49), a sugarcane farmer from the village of Hanmanth Nagar. His debts amount to 1 lakh rupees (1,400 euros).

Shivanna was the husband of Sushma (32, holding their one year old daughter) and the son of Savithriamma (65, left) and Kempegowda (72, right). After his sugarcane field dried up, his debts reached 6 lakhs rupees (about 8,000 euros) and he killed himself by drinking poison.

Shivanna (35), in a picture kept by his mother Savithriamma. “He never touched any alcohol”, she remembers, “yet that day he bought some at a shop. He probably needed it to do what he was planning to do.”

A day labourer harvesting sugarcane in the village of Madhar Halli.

Shivalinga Gowda (50) shows us a box of insecticide for sugarcane like the one his 23 years old son Madhu consumed to kill himself after he had accumulated large debts while managing the family farm in the village of Arechakanahalli.

Palm trees over the field on which Madhu killed himself. The field was left fallow at the time, as there was no water to grow sugarcane.

Kempegowda (72) with the family's buffalo cow, whose milk provides the only revenue of the family after his son Shivanna committed suicide. Shivanna was the sole breadwinner in a family with seven dependants.

Loading harvested sugarcane near Chikkamandhgere.

Rathnamma (38). Last November, her 45 years old husband Mariappa killed himself after his debts had accumulated to 7 lakhs rupees (more than 9,000 euros). “I did not know anything about it”, she says, “he kept everything to himself.”

Images of gods left under a tree in a countryside shrine in Karadakere.

The “My Sugar” factory in Mandya. Sugar factories are owned by some of the most important businessmen in the state, and are the largest buyers of sugarcane. They also have a habit of taking up to a year to pay farmers.

S.B Hanumantha Gowda (50), a sugarcane farmer from the village of Karadakere. He has no debts.

Fields of sugarcane somewhere near the village of Chalegowdan.

Mandya District, Southern India

The Bitter Taste of Sugarcane

Farmers have been working the lands of Southern India for more than 10,000 years, making wise use of its fertile soil and abundant rains. To a visitor from less tropical places, the Mandya district in the state of Karnataka appears to consist largely of lush, tilled plains where the sugarcane fields stretch as far as the eye can see.
Vast empires and sophisticated cultures have been built on the work of Indian farmers, with the products often taken away from them by rulers, landowners and men who came from lands across the seas. When India finally became independent, farmers were placed at the centre of the national identity of the world's largest democracy. Then came the Green Revolution, with its modern technologies and fertilizers, and then the neoliberal economic reforms of the 90s. Free from foreign domination and working in a modern, developing country, it seemed as if Indian farmers could finally work for themselves, and enjoy the fruits of their work.

Yet millions of them barely make a living, and many think they don't even have a chance of doing that, choosing to end their lives in one of the greatest waves of mass suicides in human history: hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last three decades. Behind these suicides there is no single motive, yet there are many common elements, and the main one is growing amounts of personal debt.
In Karnataka, almost one thousand farmers have killed themselves in 2015, with about 90 in the Mandya district alone. It is too late to ask them why they did it, but there is no shortage of people to talk to, such as the countless people affected by the crisis: widows, relatives and fellow farmers, most of whom readily admit that they are also in debt. “It's part of being a sugarcane grower”, they often add, explaining that you used to make a decent living with sugarcane, which is one of the most profitable crops. So what has changed that is pushing the sugarcane growers of Mandya over the edge?

The list of misfortunes and complaints is long, with many factors and policies aggravating each other in a vicious cycle that makes growing sugarcane essentially unprofitable and traps farmers in a spiral of growing debt from which they see no way out. To make matters worse, even the climate is changing and the monsoon has become “erratic”, threatening entire crops of sugarcane, a plant that notoriously needs a lot of water. If one wonders why these farmers were growing it in the first place, the answer might be that in a country essentially lacking free public health care and most other public services, money means security. In order to guarantee a degree of security to their families, those fortunate enough to have some land decide to use it to grow the most profitable crop, sugarcane. To do so, they have to buy seedlings, hire labourers, make sure there is water, harvest the product and bring it to be processed before it is too late, all of which costs money.

As both farming and Indian society become more modern, with the fragmentation of large families in which everybody worked together, both production and labour costs increase. And whatever security Indian farmers are looking for, it is hard to find in the unregulated, globalised markets of the 21st century. Competing with large-scale foreign farmers and dealing with the wild fluctuations in international prices, the sugarcane farmers of Mandya complain that they are not getting enough support from the government, and are left at the mercy of fate.
With more than half of India's population moving to its skyrocketing cities and the growth of an urban, modernized middle-class, nobody seems to pay too much attention to the plight of Indian farmers. “Let these farmers fend for themselves. If crops fail, they will figure out what to do”, commented a member of the Indian Parliament in 2014, “let them die if they must. Those who can afford farming will do it, the others will not”.