Death under the Punjab sun

A villager stands near his cows on the banks of a pond in the village of Artiya. Picture / Reuters

For Sale: one farming village: 730ha of fertile arable land, 280 houses. All serious offers considered. It's an intriguing offer. Malsinghwala is a village like any other of the thousands across Punjab - a collection of low, brick buildings, a dusty road, and fields thick with crops that stretch across an endless flat landscape.

Sikh farmers pass by wearing brightly coloured turbans, ceremonial daggers slung at their sides. Women stagger along the road carrying huge bundles of crops on their heads. A tractor passes by with Bollywood music hammering out of crudely attached loudspeakers.

But a few months ago, an advertisement appeared in the local newspaper. It said the entire village of Malsinghwala was for sale.

Malsinghwala is one of a spate of villages across India that suddenly have been put up for sale like this. Sixteen hundred kilometres south, in the village of Dorli in Maharashtra, farmers have painted "for sale" signs across the backs of their cows and on the trees. In another village in Maharashtra, a banner reads: "This village is ready to be auctioned. Permit us to commit mass suicides."

In the village of Chingapur, the villagers invited the Indian Prime Minister to preside over a "human market" to auction off their kidneys. Something is badly wrong in rural India.

"It is debt," says Gurjit Singh, a huge Sikh farmer who is standing under the hot sun, handing loose fibres to two elderly men painstakingly spinning them into a rope by hand. "We cannot pay our debts. If someone else can come here and make the land pay, we're prepared to work for them."

The farmers of Malsinghwala own their own land. But they are so heavily in debt they would prefer to give that up and work as common labourers. Mahatma Gandhi's dream of a strong, independent Indian society based around its villages is dying out here, under the hot Punjab sun.

It is happening even as India is going through an extraordinary economic boom that is transforming it from a Third World country to a global economic power, almost overnight.

The economy is growing at more than 8 per cent a year, and the cities are changing so fast that you can see the difference from week to week. The United States is courting India as a strategic ally, and foreign companies are jostling each other to get a share of the huge potential market.

India's big companies are talking about the country's agriculture as a huge untapped resource, with exceptionally fertile land and tropical fruits, rice and spices considered among the world's best. But the villages show no signs of India's economic miracle yet. The people are still mired in grinding poverty.

Punjab is known as the "bread-basket of India". The most fertile farmland in India has made it one of the country's richest states. But out in the villages, life is harsh. It is searingly hot in summer: the temperature regularly rises to 45C but the villagers cannot afford air conditioning.

"AC? We don't even have a fan," one laughs, then points to a tree. "That is our air conditioning," he says. "We lie in the shade under a tree. It's too hot to move."

The people live in communal houses shared by several brothers. Each lives in one or two small rooms with his wife and children, grouped around a central yard where they keep cows and buffalo.

Gurjit Singh is the richest man in Malsinghwala: he owns 5.6ha of land. He has debts of $7000, but he makes only $1840 a year, out of which he has to feed and clothe his three children. He is trapped in a cycle of debt he can never pay off.

He is not alone. Four farmers have already committed suicide in this tiny village rather than face their impossible debts. The farmers are at the mercy of unscrupulous moneylenders who charge annual interest rates of 24 per cent.

The farmers live hand-to-mouth: they have no capital to buy seeds and fertiliser, so each year they need loans. The deal is simple: the farmers repay the loan with a percentage of the crop. But if a single harvest fails because of poor rainfall, the farmers are lost.

Unable to pay off the loan, they face huge interest they cannot pay off and that accumulates year by year. And in recent times, Punjab has endured several years of drought.

"We cannot go to the banks for a loan," Singh explains. "If you go to the bank, the manager demands a bribe for agreeing to the loan. To get a loan of 100,000 rupees, we have to pay the manager a bribe of 20,000 rupees."

There was a major scandal in India two years ago after hundreds of farmers unable to pay their debts committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh, in the south. There have been suicides in Malsinghwala, too, but the people have decided to fight. Facing the unpayable debts, the panchayat, the village council, in Malsinghwala met and decided to put the village up for sale.

Harshikanpura, a couple of hours' drive across the maze of dusty lanes that thread their way through the fields, was the first village in India to put itself up for sale. That was five years ago, in 2001, and at the time it was dismissed as a publicity stunt.

Harshikanpura has inspired a rash of imitators across the country.

But the villagers' gambit has not paid off. After five years on the market, not a single buyer has come forward for Harshikanpura. The villagers insist the offer is still on. They refuse to give a price for the village, saying they will consider any serious offers. "We're hoping a big company will buy the land and build a factory here," says Baldev Singh, one of the villagers. "Then we can work in the factory."

There is little chance of that. Harshikanpura is right in the middle of India's cotton-growing belt, and no one will want to build a factory on this fertile land.

But the fact that farmers working in what should be a lucrative agricultural sector are so desperate they want to sell their villages shows that something is not right in Indian farming.

Even as India is emerging at last as an economic force to be reckoned with, the villages that Gandhi dreamed of basing independent India around are struggling and dying.

It is the cities that are driving the economic boom, and every year hundreds of thousands of Indians migrate to the already bursting cities looking for a better life.

"They say India is becoming rich but we have not seen any of it," said Gurjan Singh. "When George Bush came here he said India is a big economy. He should have come to Harshikanpura, then he'd have seen the truth about India."

Part of the problem in Punjab is that the tradition of dividing a farmer's land between his sons after his death is making some farms so small they are economically unviable. Farms have been divided again and again until the descendants of men who farmed hundreds of hectares have tiny plots.

That may soon change, with Indian big business showing increasing interest in buying produce directly from farmers to sell in their own retail outlets, cutting out the middle-men.

That could be bad news for the moneylenders who get the crops to pay off their loans. And it could be good news for the villagers. But it could also change Indian rural life forever, in a way that will take India even further from Gandhi's ideal, and into the tough commercial realities of modern capitalism.

In the villages, they are not worried about that. They just want a way out of the cycle of impossible debt.

- INDEPENDENT