Falling into a debt-trap and besieged by bad weather, thousands of farmers are taking their own lives each year.
Baba Umar |Umbrale, India - After days of hushed chanting that "the sky betrayed" him, Datatery Popat Ghadwaje, 42, committed suicide by ingesting insecticides at his grape orchard.
Crushed under a $41,000 debt and a series of bank repayment notices, Ghadwaje of Umbrale village in the western state of Maharashtra finally lost hope when back-to-back hailstorms destroyed his Thompson grape plantation last month.
"He was under tremendous pressure," Ghadwaje's 16-year-old son, Bhagwan Datatery, told Al Jazeera.
"The harvest was his only hope. Hailstorms took everything away from us," he said, describing how his father was found face up in the orchard, foaming at the mouth before he died.
Snaking, macadamised roads lead to this sleepy village, where pyramid-shaped hills look over the green landscape, and where vineyards and pomegranate orchards destroyed by storms stand apart.
Suicide among farmers is routine in India's interior, yet Ghadwaje's grim death still shocked many in the area. READ MORE
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