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In debt and
in despair
"No
one cares, especially not the government," lament the farmers
of Karuwalagaswewa on the Puttalam-Anuradhapura Road. Gathered for
a shramadhana campaign in the garden of the Buddhist temple at the
eighth milepost just before Vesak, they feel they are a neglected
lot. The shramadana is compulsory for them to get their meagre Rs.750-worth
of food stamps under the Samurdhi scheme of assistance. "There
is much labour involved in paddy cultivation. From the time we sow
our fields we have to be vigilant, first against the birds, which
come in flocks to eat the seed, then when the paddy plants raise
their heads we have to protect them against pests and finally when
the paddy sheaves ripen and turn to gold, come the elephants,"
says 53-year-old U.R. Chandrasekera, a father of four who cultivates
a two-acre plot. His crops were washed away last time and he is
a disillusioned man, for he wrote many a letter to the officials
to no avail. A similar tale
is told by Thushari Samanthika, 29. A mother of two young children
she cultivates their three acres with her husband. But the last
maha season in December had been disastrous. "We spent
about 20,000 rupees on tractor charges for ploughing, labour, fertilizer
and pesticides, but the weather was unkind to us," she says,
explaining, "Wessa wedi wuna, kumbura nikkamma yatawuna"
(There was too much rain and our fields were flooded). She and her
family could not even recover the costs. The costs are
also unbearable for H.M. BandaraMenike, a widow of 52, who cultivates
the land alone. What she paid for two "miti" (sacks) of
fertilizer those days, now she forks out for one. "A 50-kilo
sack of urea is now Rs. 855," she grumbles, adding that she
can hardly feed her three children even one square meal a day. She
invested about Rs. 35,000 in her fields last season but was unable
to recover even Rs. 12,000. Their grouse
is that though the price of fertilizer and diesel - which they need
when they hire tractors - go up, the price of paddy has not changed.
Most of the farmers in the area cultivating their fields under the
Thabowewa or Karambawewa sell their harvest to the co-operative
or the middleman. "There isn't much of a difference. Sometimes,
the middleman pays about 25 cents more, but that's it. Overall the
price of paddy is poor. Every farmer
is drowning in a sea of debt, says Thushari as the others nod in
despair. "Even today some of us have scraped up a little money
to give the Samurdhi Niyayamaka, as repayment of the Samurdhi loans
we have taken." Their simple
question is: Why can't farmers have an insurance scheme like the
fishermen? "We are being given step-motherly treatment," adds Chandrasekera as we ponder on the glorious past when Sri Lanka was the Granary of the East and the farmer came next to the king. In
fear of the jumbos
Fifty-year-old Daya, mother of a son and a daughter, is in the "thala
business". "My neighbours and I cannot even keep a papaw
tree or a manioc plant. The elephants come at all times of the day,
especially at night. We don't have electricity, so we have to step
out with lanterns and chase them away like cattle by hooting and
throwing stones, " she says. A neighbour had her hut damaged.
The villagers wonder what has happened to the project to have an
electric fence to deter elephants coming across from the Wilpattu
National Park. Houses were broken and a drain cut to fix it, but nothing has happened. Only big boards put up along the road that the area is a sanctuary, the villagers say. The elephants, of course, don't heed these boards, they laugh. Waiting
and waiting
"About 35 of us from Karuwalagaswewa 640C area did shramadana
during the naththal (Christmas) holidays from about 8 in the morning
to noon. On Christmas Day we worked till about 3 in the afternoon
on the understanding that we would get food stamps to the value
of Rs. 1,500," complains Damayanthi Kumari, 25.
A mother of four children ranging in age from one and a half to
seven, Damayanthi remembers the time very well, because she worked
soon after having her youngest. Her husband is a labourer who helps
out in other people's fields. They don't own any paddyland only
a little plot where they grow some banana and thala (gingelly). They toiled in the scorching sun, while the older women looked after their children at home. "We cleared roads and cut drains, in the hope that we would get food stamps worth Rs. 1,500, but so far we have received only hundred-rupees worth of stamps, that too after several months, she says taking the lead among the farmers. They have waited and waited and are still waiting in hope. |
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