Portrait of a struggling but resolute farm widow.
A decade after her husband took his own life to join a burgeoning list of farmers committing suicide in Vidarbha, this 40-something farm widow is rebuilding her life & family. Full story: bit.ly/2Hyw5uZ [thread]👇
A decade after her husband took his own life to join a burgeoning list of farmers committing suicide in Vidarbha, this 40-something farm widow is rebuilding her life & family. Full story: bit.ly/2Hyw5uZ [thread]👇
Ujjwala Pethkar had no time to mourn, no luxury to rest and no support to fall back on. She was in her early thirties when Prabhakar consumed an insecticide to end himself. Responsibilities fell upon her: from tending to her farm to repaying debts to raising the two kids.
Brooding over the past decade Ujjwala fights her tears while cutting her gram crop. Blistering sun has just announced the onset of spring that does not deter her from working the field. “If I do not work, my children would not have a future – I can toil any longer for them.”
Alone in her own shadow, Ujjwala is the struggling yet resolute face of the struggling farm widows. She’s the portrait of an enduring farm-woman, an image of hundreds of farm widows, shouldering the family burden and confronting a farm crisis that refuses to die down.
Ujjwala works all day, all seasons, in her fields, to grow cotton, soybeans, maize, gram and wheat. She will be placing, despite the daunting challenges, food on your platter this summer; when her wheat crop is ready she’ll harvest it, collect it and bring it to the markets.
Ujjwala is proud of her daughter Vrushali, about 10 when her father died, and now a confident young working woman. Vrushali shifted to Nagpur to train as a nurse after her matriculation. She works with a private hospital. Son Prasheel, 17, has dropped out & works as a labourer.
Ujjwala was married off at the age of 19 by her farmer parents. “I knew nothing about agriculture.” Today, she farms smartly, rotates the crops; tries new things and tides over the finances. “Farming is difficult,” she says.
“Agriculture is not women friendly,” Ujjwala says. “When I go to a bank, clerks don’t take me seriously; when I go to market, men stare at me as if an outsider has intruded their bastion,” she says. “Farm labourers, even women, don’t come to my farm easily.”
It is noon, and Ujjwala must stack the gram hay. Recurring droughts pose an ever present threat to her yield. “I am back in debt & loss,” she smiles wryly. Losses did her husband in. “Two lakh rupees was our debt when he passed away,” she says. "I am buying time from borrowers.”
Death is not the way out of crisis, she says a tad philosophical. “We get this birth only once; sorrows are a part of life; my husband killed himself without thinking about us.”
