It was the year rural India's agony gnawed at the conscience of the Government after farmers took desperate measures to voice their plight. Over 8,000 farmers committed suicide in the last decade due to repeated crop failures, inability to meet the rising cost of cultivation, and indebtedness. Fed up with futile initiatives, farmers threatened to jump off water tanks in Vidarbha, Maharashtra, set up kidney sale centres and offered entire villages for sale. With Punjab's Malwa cotton-growing belt reporting suicides, the problem seemed to be spreading across the Vindhyas. Reams of administrative paper have expounded the problem of marginalization of land holdings, which prompts farmers to borrow money from moneylenders who charge astronomical interest rates. Small-time farmers cannot even afford the lower rate of 14 per cent charged by cooperatives. While Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for pulling thousands out of poverty through micro-credit, India was left wondering if the thousands of crores promised to the Indian farmer