Early in November, Raju Kacher, a tall, strapping, bespectacled 29-year-old with neatly-combed hair, came home from Hyderabad to celebrate ...
Early in November, Raju Kacher, a tall, strapping, bespectacled 29-year-old with neatly-combed hair, came home from Hyderabad to celebrate Diwali with his family in Naganva. It is a small village of many narrow dusty lanes colonised by large cows and buffaloes, in Naraini block of Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district.
Just outside the village, a small patch of farmland that Kacher and his brothers owned – about two bighas, or a third of an acre – lay fallow. A crop of chickpeas planted during the monsoon had already been harvested. As the winter approached, there was no source of water to grow another crop.
Like most other farmers in the village, Kacher’s family cannot afford the Rs 5 lakh they need to install a tubewell to pump out groundwater. “There is no government tubewell in our village either.” There is a riverfed canal, but it “has been dry for 20 years,” he added. “And you can’t obviously survive on one crop.”
As a result, Kacher said he could at best spend a few weeks at home before heading back to Hyderabad, where he polished marble slabs for a living.
Hyderabad and Naganva may be more than 1,000 km apart, but the young man was not worried...
