Desperate farmers sell wives, daughters

This was published 10 years ago

Desperate farmers sell wives, daughters

FARMERS in India made destitute by droughts blamed on climate change are selling their wives to brothels to pay off moneylenders.

A succession of droughts compounded by flash floods in recent years have destroyed crops and ruined the soil, leaving farmers in debt to loan sharks.

The growing number of farmers who have committed suicide to escape the shame has attracted concern but less attention has been paid to farmers handing their wives and daughters over to prostitution.

Sangeeta, a farmer's wife from the Bundelkhand area, which straddles Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and has been particularly hard-hit, told campaigners how her husband had sold her to a pimp for one month to raise 2500 rupees ($60) to settle a debt.

''We had nothing to eat and my husband had huge debts. It was difficult to survive and I had to sell myself to live,'' she said.


The disclosure of a trade in women to settle debts emerged as an Oxfam report detailed how climate change had affected Indian agriculture.

''In India and across the world, Oxfam is seeing poor people going without food, pulling their children out of school and selling off cattle and other assets critical to their livelihoods to pay for the debts caused by continuing crop failure,'' said Nisha Agrawal, the chief executive of Oxfam India.

''Without support to help farmers adapt to the changing climate, the effect is a downward spiral into deeper poverty.''

One farmer in the Jhansi district said a moneylender had taken his wife and three children to settle a loan he had taken out to buy a water pump to irrigate his fields.

The man, identified only as a Mr Kalicharan, 40, had borrowed 30,000 rupees from a moneylender in a neighbouring village to irrigate his small landholding in 2001 when the droughts first started to hit.

After three years of falling yields and other blows to his livelihood, a severe drought wiped out his crop, leaving him with no money to offer the moneylender.

''He came to my house and asked for money,'' Mr Kalicharan said.

''I told him to give me some time to arrange money but he forcibly entered my house and took my wife and children.''

His wife never came back and she now had a child by the moneylender.

Telegraph, London

Most Viewed in World