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(5 Jun 2016) LEAD IN: A relentless drought in parts of India has devastated crops and cattle leaving many farmers in heavy debt and workers jobless. Some 400 farmers have committed suicide so far this year in the parched Marathwada region – home to some 19 million people. STORY-LINE: Withered fruit trees and dry reservoirs across the Marathwada region reflect the suffering of hundreds of millions of Indians across at least a dozen states that are in the grip of severe drought. Monsoon showers, which normally run from June to September, are crucial in a country where 60 percent of the population works in agriculture and less than half the farmland is irrigated. For the average farmer, who lives and earns from season to season, a poor monsoon means food must be carefully rationed. Marathwada, a central Indian region, has been devastated by two successive failed monsoons and crippling drought. For two years Srikrishna Pandit Agee, a local farmer, was hopeful that things might improve. He borrowed hundreds of thousands of rupees (thousands of dollars) to build a pipeline that connected a local dam to his fields of cotton and sugarcane. Two years ago the water stopped. The debts kept growing. In May this year (2016) Agee walked out into his fields and hanged himself from a tree. The family still must pay back the loans or risk losing their land. "Constant failure of crops. Very low produce. He couldn't recover the investments, could not pay back the bank loans. That's why he killed himself," says his brother Umesh Pandit Agee. With dreams of a good harvest, most small and medium-scale farmers borrow money, often at exorbitant interest rates of up to 10 percent per month, to buy seeds, fertilisers and hire tractors. Consecutive droughts are enough to wipe out most small farmers' meagre savings and push them into destitution. In Marathwada, locals say the current drought is one of the worst in living memory. "I have two daughters who are ready to get married. I didn't have money to buy soyabean seeds, so no crops this year, no water in the dam. So I basically don't have anything." says local farmer, Balasahib Jadav. Poor farm labourers, hired by middlemen to work on large farms, have been forced to work for little or no money. People like sugarcane worker Baburao Majmule now find themselves trapped between the middlemen who hired them and the farm owners who paid for the labour. "The contractor had taken more money from the owner, and we were given a small amount of it to work in sugarcane factory. The contractor disappeared and the owner did not allow us to leave until he recovered all of his money," he says. Other's like Kevel and Sukhdev Londe - both contract labourers - were not paid at all and threatened with violence. They were eventually rescued from their fraudulent contracts by the local rural development organisation, Gramin Vikas Kendra "We were given some money by our contractor to work in the sugarcane fields. We worked for two to three months, and then the contractor disappeared, without paying us. Many of us did not have food to eat or clothes to wear," says Kevel. "They would threaten to beat us up, and they would call the police who'd also force us to work. But we did not want to work. They would threaten us and say 'we'll see how you will leave from here,'" says Sukhdev. Landlocked Marathwada has historically suffered from water shortages, but decades of poor agricultural and water management policies have pushed the region to the brink. A recent agricultural shift has made things worse. Farmers who once grew millet, sorghum and other cereals have turned to sugarcane, which fetches more money, but is a water-guzzler. In the eight districts of Marathwada, that is still a distant dream. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/7c549e992a3f8dbd807dec58b4b8fa97 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork