This Dussehra, Pitabasha did not go for the customary sighting of the Indian Roller, or tiha, as it is called in Odia. The bird is believed to grant wishes, and every year thousands of people flock to farms, fields and forests hoping to glimpse it and make a wish. But the 30-year-old farmer from Matupali village in Odisha stayed back. From that day, he also stopped calling himself a farmer.
“I do not wish anymore.”
His one-hectare paddy field lay ruined, flattened by incessant September rains. Fiddling with his government-issued farmer card, he recalls his college days and the school textbooks that described farmers as the happiest people in society. He remembers the meditative rhythm of a life spent nurturing seeds and waiting at the government paddy procurement centre, which farmers half-jokingly call their “legislative assembly”.
He was never a reluctant farmer. “I liked farming, and I earned from it,” he says. After graduating in history, he returned to his village to take it up as a livelihood, ignoring his father’s firm advice against it. “Human history is about land and the people who grow food,” he had reasoned back then, convinced of his choice.
A week before Dussehra, however, he sensed his life was about to change. “Low pressure—that is all I heard throughout September,” he says. “For years now, it is not the monsoon we talk about, but these low-pressure systems. When they come in September or October, the rains pour endlessly and wipe out my crops, a yearly investment on my livelihood.”
He has kept an accountant’s eye on his losses. In the past 10 years, he has lost his crop in eight. “Not just losses, debts are piling up each year as I borrow to start again,” he says. His current debt stands at `3 lakh. “From the two good years I had, I calculated that it will take four normal seasons just to repay the loans. If I include my living expenses, it will take 10 years.”
Extreme weather and abnormal climatic conditions have become a defining part of a farmer’s life. Like Pitabasha, farmers across India now live at the mercy of a new climate that nobody knows how to evolve with or adapt to. “History books always described rain and seasons as certain things,” he says. Farming evolved with that certainty. For over 12,000 years, predictable seasons made farming, the most defining existential change in our evolution, possible. But not anymore, he adds.
Eight years ago, drawing on his experience, Pitabasha decided not to sow in June, the traditional time, because the monsoon no longer arrived on schedule. “Even in July, rains were patchy, so I waited till the first half was over. When it finally rained, my paddy fields looked lush,” he recalls. But in August, the new peak month for rain, the pattern turned erratic again, stunting crops. “Then in September, when the plants were about to bear grain, we got too much rain. It killed everything.” It is a pattern seen across India, the month of September now brings the most crop damage.
Pitabasha is yet to decide what he will do next. He has simply stopped farming. He is one among the estimated 2,000 farmers who quit agriculture every day in India. Farming is no longer remunerative. Now, the changes in the weather pattern makes it a suicidal venture. “If a livelihood cannot even support your life, what is the point of it?”
He recalls a story his grandfather used to tell of a village that lost all its farmers after being cursed by the rain god Indra. “Maybe that curse is back,” he says with a wry smile. “Only this time, it is called climate change.”