Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [63]
He was slow-minded, short on his lights, and worked the fields, then took loans for the daughter’s wedding, and felt trapped.
He said, “Father, I will kill myself if you don’t buy me a cellphone,” then he went and drank the poison.
The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had come down from Delhi to express his concern for the farmers’ hardship, and the central government’s determination to relieve it. The families of some indebted suicides would get government compensation, and a debt-restructuring and interest-waiver program had begun for the farmers who had borrowed from banks instead of moneylenders. A massive national scheme to increase rural incomes was also underway, guaranteeing unemployed villagers a hundred days a year of publicly subsidized work. One of the government’s hopes was to stop villagers from abandoning their farms and further inundating cities like Mumbai, but Asha’s relatives knew nothing of these celebrated relief programs.
Among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade. Elsewhere that summer, public telecom licenses worth the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars were being sold to the highest under-the-table corporate bidder; public funds meant to build world-class sports facilities for the 2010 Commonwealth Games were being diverted to private interests; parliamentary opposition to the future of a landmark India–United States nuclear treaty was being softened by trunksful of cash; and the combined wealth of the hundred richest Indians was surging to equal nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP.
In a forested stretch of Vidarbha east of where Asha and her husband had grown up, many citizens had stopped believing the government’s promises about improving their fortunes. Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they’d helped revive a forty-year-old movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail-bombs, and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India’s 627 districts, including an underdeveloped swath of central and eastern India known as the “Red Belt.” This summer, the Maoists had been especially productive in the state of Orissa. They’d sunk a boat full of military commandos, killing thirty-eight, and bombed a police van, killing twenty-one more.
In most rural villages, however, people weren’t yet talking revolution. They were waiting to see if improvements in infrastructure and agricultural technology might change their prospects. This year, as Manju’s seventeen-year-old cousin Anil labored in the cotton and soybean fields, he carried one such advance on his back: a heavy metal canister of Dow pesticide.
The fields on which he worked belonged to a rich politician who paid his laborers a thousand rupees, or twenty-one dollars, a month. While the politician’s crop yield and profit increased with the new chemicals, the freight of the canisters and the noxious inhalations made the laborers’ work, never easy, blisteringly hard. At the end of a recent workday, one of Anil’s co-workers had set down his canister, climbed a tree at the edge of the farm, and hanged himself. His family received no government compensation for the loss.
At night, Anil had many imaginary conversations with the politician for whom he worked, in which he gently argued that more difficult labor be rewarded by slightly higher pay. A complaining worker was easily replaced, though. Anil kept his thoughts, including the suicidal ones, to himself.
Try your luck in Annawadi, Asha had suggested the previous year, and so Anil had become one of the roughly five hundred thousand rural Indians who annually arrived in Mumbai. Each dawn, he stood with other work-seekers at Marol Naka, an intersection near the airport where construction supervisors came in trucks to pick up day