Farmers Movement Archive

At Tikri, widows from Punjab narrate hardships of life on the farm & in debt

BATHINDA: Pain was visible on their wrinkled faces as they spoke of their miseries for the first time on a stage outside Punjab. Women, whose husbands had committed suicide due to farm debt, on Wednesday narrated their tales of woes to people gathered at the farmers’ agitation on the Tikri border of Haryana and Delhi. Harjinder Kaur (52) from Pandori village in Barnala district, whose husband Lakhwinder Singh committed suicide as he failed to pay his debt, said the family had already sold little over two acres of land before he took the extreme step. After his suicide, Harjinder mortgaged the home, but she still owes nearly Rs 4 lakh. While her two daughters are married, her sons are unemployed with just a handful of landholding left to till. “I too wanted to kill myself, but there would have been no one to take care of my four children. I survived, but our life is miserable,” said Harjinder. Sarabjit Kaur of Bhattiwal Kalan village and Angrej Kaur of Gurthari village had similar stories. Angrej, who has three kids and no means of livelihood as the family had sold its small landholding of 1 acre, said she had nothing to feed her kids. “ I hope when we are at the national capital, the government will listen to us and provide some assistance,” she said. BKU (Ekta Ugrahan) women’s wing head Harinder Kaur Bindu told TOI that every widow had her own tale of woes. “The organisation requested these underprivileged widows and men who have lost their fathers or sons to mounting debt, to come at Delhi border so that the entire country could see how the agrarian crisis has ruined lives of thousands of families in Punjab, which otherwise is a prosperous land in the eyes of the outer world. We want PM Narendra Modi’s government to see all this and do justice with farmers,” she said.

The Times of India

2020-12-17

Chandigarh