Crisis in the paddy cultivators in Andhra Pradesh-a study of Guntur district

Andhra Pradesh is historically known as the "Rice Bowl of India", Andhra Pradesh stands 6th in area, 3rd in production, and 2nd in productivity and contributes nearly 12% of the national rice production. Andhra farmers grow rice annually in an area of 3.98 M Ha in 22 districts Rice is grown under a wide variety of conditions in India as well as in Andhra Pradesh. During the year 2011–12 in Andhra Pradesh, Paddy production in the Kharif season was 112.64 Lakh MT and in the Rabi season was 103.64 Lakh MT, totaling to 216.28 Lakh MT.East & West Godavari districts alone contributed 61.05 Lakh MT. The Fig-1 shows Area, production and yield of rice in Andhra Pradesh year-wise for the last 10 years. This paper is to analyze the cost and return of the paddy cultivation in costal Andhra Pradesh. This paper is base on the primary data of 100 sample respondents are selected on simple random sampling method. The sample households are selected from Krapa village of Kollure mandal in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. This paper collected the information about the cost of cultivation, income from the paddy cultivation. The cost of cultivation of paddy in costal Andhra region is 1783/per quintal because of increasing the price of all inputs.Basically paddy is a labour intensive crop, now a days the wages are hiked and labours are not available at the time of harvesting stage due to MGNREGA works and migration of labours from other districts.Shortage of labour has a reason to introduce the mechanization in transplantation and harvesting of paddy. Today the price of all fertilizers like urea,20–20, DAP, and other complex fertilizers prices are increased 120 per cent.The cost fertilizers is 30 per cent of the total cost. Majority of suicides-farmers are tenant or marginalized farmers in Andhra Pradesh. It‘s covered 50 to 60 per cent-of the sown area. The rental value of lease in land is in bag and cash is 30 bags and Rs 20000/-per annum. The tenant farmer are face high rent of land and he is insecure the owners to continue his tenancy in future. All the inputs prices are increased and the same way the prices of the entire consumer good also increased like vegetables, cereals, pulses, oil, and onions. Today the price of rice increased Rs15/-to 45/-rupees and it leads to increasing the consumption expenditure. This is a mistory the farmers sold their output with less price in the same he purchased with can paid high price in the market.All these thinks are pushed the farmers in to debt crisis and majority of farmers are depended on the money lenders, traders and commission agent for credit and this is leads to increasing the indebtedness then its leads to suicides. Many states including Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashatra and Kerala have recorded a spurt in distress driven suicides among the farmers. The status of suicides victims was poor and which belongs to tenants, marginal and small farmers who could not sustain frequently price stock.