In 2002-2004, Karnataka's S.M. Krishna government blamed farmers' suicides on alcoholism and gambling. This time around, the authorities cannot ignore the bitter harvest and its aftermath. In Bidar district alone, 48 farmers have killed themselves since July 2006. All of them were sugarcane cultivators. .News of suicides is trickling in from Gulbarga, Gadag, Mandya and Chamarajanagar. The possibility of this being an election year prompted the Janata Dal (Secular)-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition government to announce waiving of farm loans. The government initially announced a complete waiver for those who had taken cooperative loans up to Rs 25,000. The Budget allocation for this was Rs 500 crore, against a requirement of Rs 1,500 crore. The government later said that Rs 25,000 would be waived irrespective of the loan amount. The scheme thus also benefited the richer farmers who had taken bigger loans. As the hugely deficit Budget could not set apart the amount for the waiver, the government said it would auction encroached government land in Bangalore to raise money. The waiver was projected as Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy's most important pro-farmer step. When more farmers committed suicide, the chief minister embarked on rhetoric. In mid-May, he said he would resign if the suicides continued. But more than 20 farmers have taken their lives since then in Bidar, Mandya, Gulbarga, Gadag and Chamarajanagar districts. A farmer who was a JD(S) worker in Chamarajanagar district wrote a six-page letter to Kumaraswamy before consuming poison on May 24. That was three days before the chief minister's visit to Chamarajanagar town. Kumaraswamy blamed it on the Centre; the solution, he said, lay in bringing a regional party to power in Karnataka, like in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Though Kumaraswamy spent eight hours withtheaffectedfarmersinBangalore, at the end of the day he merely reiterated that he would resign. While a visit to the villages is enough to fathom the hopelessness in the rural sector, authorities either fail to acknowledge an agrarian crisis Hanging in balance: Farmers have little hope of tiding over the crisis to be responsible for the deaths or see the suicides as media hype. Reactions like "they are committing suicide to get the Rs 1 lakh compensation" reek of official apathy. No compensation can wipe the tears of Rajappa Shankarappa Kamthane's family; the 46-year-old farmer hanged himself from a tree on his 33 guntas (an acre is 40 guntas) on April 18. His wife, three daughters and two sons now live in a dilapidated hut in Kamthane village, about 10km from Bidar town. Another son, Babu Rao, killed himself two years ago. Rajappa had sold his crop to a private sugar factory for Rs 300 a tonne. Cooperative sugar factories were offering Rs 800 a tonne, but he was not a shareholder in any of the three such factories in the district. Nor did he have the political clout to get his sugarcane crushed (the process of extracting juice). The factory did not pay Rajappa, who had private loans worth Rs 1.25 lakh; a cooperative loan of Rs 15,000 was waived. His brother Kalappa, who is handlingthe family's finances, has the list of creditors. The family received the compensation but that will not be enough to pay them all. Rajappa's widow earns Rs 20 as an agricultural labourer. Marriages of the two elder daughters had added to their debt. The youngest, Meenakshi, studies in class 9. She might have to quit school if things don't look up. "If she joins me in the field, she will get Rs 20 a day," said Rajappa's widow. Unlike Rajappa, Kalappa Karbadi was a shareholder in the N.S.S.K. Sugar Factory, one of the three cooperative factories in Bidar. But indefinite delay in harvesting the crop drove the 60-year-old farmer to desperation; he drank pesticide and died on his 4-acre plot in Nelagi on April 7. "The labour gangs were demanding exorbitant sums to harvest and transport the crop to the factories though it would otherwise cost only Rs 1,500 per truck load," said Kalappa's sons Sharanappa and Suryakanth. "Only farmers who paid the biggest bribe got their cane lifted." Kalappa was in debt: private loans worth Rs 2 lakh and a cooperative loan of Rs 75,000. The labourers from N.S.S.K. Factory came after Kalappa's death, but they still charged Rs 5,000 to harvest the sugarcane. "They came because our father killed himself," said Sharanappa. "If it had been cut at 11 months, we would have got 100 tonnes. We got only 70 tonnes because the harvest was delayed by four months." Some farmers voiced their concerns but that did not improve things. When the Bidar Cooperative Sugar Factory did not lift his crop, Sivanand Biradar of Sirakatanahalli and a few fellow farmers protested in front of the factory and met its authorities. That the 40-year-old farmer was a JD(S) worker did not help either. His cane was 14 months old. Sivanand stayed up for bhajans in connection with an elder's death on March 21, returned home next morning and killed himself, leaving wife, Eramma, three daughters and a son to fend for themselves. Sivanand and his two brothers, Vishwanath and Nageshetty, togeth