“This photo is my guard, it’s my strength,” says C. Alivelamma, a 35-year-old farmer from Kurugunta village of Anantapur Mandal. Alivelamma carries her husband’s photo in a small cover alongside her ATM card.
Alivelamma’s husband, C Venkataramudu, a tenant farmer, committed suicide in 2013 by consuming chemical pellets that are used to preserve groundnuts. “He told me that there are a lot of debts and that the crops aren’t returning profit. He used to tell me that ‘the moneylenders are asking. I feel very tight in my heart. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know if I can get some money for [sowing] groundnut'. Alivelamma often asked her husband to stop sowing groundnut, but he insisted on sowing groundnut and used to say that “we should search [for the money we lost] where we lost it.”
