My grandfather never came to Pakistan. When partition split the subcontinent in 1947 and my father crossed the border to build a life in what would become a new country, his father stayed. The land in Bihar held him. He tilled it until the end, died on it, and was buried in it. He never left India. He never left the farm.
My father graduated from Patna University, built a career, raised a family in Karachi. But he carried that image his whole life: his own father, back in Bihar, still farming the same stubborn soil, in a country that was no longer his.
I grew up with that story at the edge of every conversation. I did not fully understand what it meant then.
I understand it now. And what I understand troubles me deeply.
A piece by [Neha Timande](paste her URL here), published recently on Medium, brought the Beed hysterectomy crisis to wider attention. These were women in Maharashtra's sugarcane belt removing their uteruses before harvest season to stay employable. Her reporting was detailed and important. What follows is not a retelling of it. It is a different question, asked from a place most writers on this subject cannot occupy: what does a Pakistani whose grandfather died farming Indian soil see in these stories that the official development narrative refuses to name?
Three Stories That Come From the Same Root
Three stories are circulating in Indian media right now, each disturbing on its own. Together they form a portrait of something much larger, what I would call India's agrarian crisis wearing three different faces.
In Maharashtra's Beed district, women in the sugarcane belt are removing their uteruses before harvest season to stay employable. Contractors finance the surgeries and recover the cost through post-operative labour. The hysterectomy rate in Beed runs at 36 percent against a national average of 3. In 2024 alone, 843 women underwent the procedure before the season began, 477 of them between the ages of 30 and 35. Elsewhere, India's farmer suicide epidemic continues its quiet count: over 100,000 documented deaths between 1995 and 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Men who fed the country and found no exit from debt. And underneath both of these sits the older wound: female foeticide in Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan. Daughters who were never born because a poor farming family calculated it could not afford one.
All three connect to a single architecture: the Indian state's sustained inability, or unwillingness, to extend basic economic protection to the people who grow its food.
What My Grandfather's Bihar Has to Do With All This
Bihar is not Maharashtra. The rice and wheat country of the Gangetic plain is not the sugarcane belt of Marathwada. But the structure of suffering is recognisable across both, and it was recognisable in my grandfather's time too. Small landholdings. Seasonal income. Debt to intermediaries: the moneylender, the contractor, the mill owner, all sitting between the farmer and any margin worth keeping. Children pulled into fields before they finish school. Women carrying the double load of agricultural labour and domestic invisibility, both unpaid in different ways.
My grandfather farmed under the British zamindari system, which had spent generations transferring land rights upward. When independence came, the land reform promises of the new Indian state were already being quietly negotiated away in state legislatures where zamindars had simply converted themselves into elected representatives, different faces running the same structure.
My father saw it clearly. He studied economics at Patna University, walked through a city where most of his rural family connections were sliding deeper into informality, into the economy that independent India was building around them but not for them. When partition came, he crossed. His father did not.
That choice, or the absence of a choice, is something I have never stopped thinking about. Two men from the same soil, the same generations of farming debt, the same Bihar. One crossed to Pakistan and eventually found a different life. The other stayed with the land because the land was all there was, and farmed it until he died.
My grandfather is buried in India. The crisis he farmed inside is still running.
The Silence That Speaks Loudest
These stories, the Beed women, the suicidal farmers, the missing daughters, are not evidence that Indian people hate their poor. That framing flattens something more complicated and harder to argue with. India has an extraordinary civil society. The Beed crisis came to light because Indian women's rights organisations fought for an inquiry. The farmer suicide data exists because Indian researchers and journalists refused to let it disappear. Female foeticide is illegal in India, and enforcement, while deeply imperfect, exists.
What these stories reveal is the distance between who India says it is building for and who actually receives the building. That distance has a name. It just rarely appears in policy documents.
Viksit Bharat, Developed India 2047, is a vision built on infrastructure, manufacturing, digital economy, and global investment. The ambition is genuine. But a nation's development story has to account for the bodies that produce it. A sugarcane worker in Beed who removes her uterus before harvest season. A wheat farmer in Punjab who took a loan in January and had no crop to sell in June. A girl in Haryana who was never born because her parents could not afford both the dowry and the farm. These are not marginal cases at the edge of the story. They are the foundation the story is built on.
The Crisis Is Not New. The Forgetting Is.
India's agrarian crisis did not begin with economic liberalisation in 1991, though liberalisation accelerated many of its dynamics. The roots go much further back: into colonial land arrangements, into the uneven reach of the Green Revolution that raised yields in some states and bypassed others, into the political economy of a democracy where rural votes are courted every five years and rural rights are managed the other 1,800 days.
The Minimum Support Price for crops has been a political football for decades. Farm loan waivers appear before elections and dissolve in implementation afterward. The MNREGA rural employment guarantee scheme, genuinely important when it functions, has been chronically underfunded and administratively weakened precisely in the years it was most needed.
The 2020-21 farm protests brought hundreds of thousands of Punjabi and Haryanvi farmers to the outskirts of Delhi for over a year. It was the loudest the agrarian voice had been in independent India. The government eventually withdrew the contested farm laws. The structural issues, procurement prices, debt relief, crop insurance, remained exactly where they were before the protests began.
Three percent of the Indian national budget goes to agriculture. The sector employs approximately 43 percent of the workforce.
That arithmetic is the crisis. Everything else, the suicides, the missing daughters, the removed uteruses, is that arithmetic made visible in human terms.
What Staying Behind Teaches
I am writing this from Karachi. My family's roots are in Indian soil quite literally, which means I am neither a foreign observer nor an Indian insider. I carry the memory without the citizenship. My grandfather carried the citizenship without ever leaving the crisis.
India's political classes, across parties, have been extraordinarily successful at performing concern for the farmer while managing his political energy and deferring his economic demands, a skill refined over 75 years of democratic practice. The protests are absorbed. The inquiry panels are commissioned. The recommendations are filed. The harvest season comes around again.
My grandfather's generation did not have language for what was being done to them. They called it kismet, fate, when the rains failed or the moneylender came early. My father studied economics and found different language. He called it structural. The system was not failing the farmer. It was working exactly as designed. The farmer was simply not the person the design had in mind.
The women of Beed know this too, in their own terms. They are not confused about why they are on the operating table before the harvest season. Awareness was never the gap. Protection was, and the repeated decision across generations not to extend it to the people who needed it most.
The Question My Grandfather Left Behind
At what point does a failure to protect become a decision to extract?
India's sugar industry, its wheat procurement system, its cotton markets are all profitable. The labour that generates those profits is cheap precisely because it is informal, unprotected, and without alternatives. The farmer who commits suicide does so because the debt structure was designed in a way that left him no visible exit. The daughter who was never born was a calculation made by parents who had been kept outside economic security for so long that another girl felt like a weight the family could not carry.
Call it policy indifference or call it policy design. The outcome is identical either way, and the people absorbing it are the same people who have always absorbed it.
My grandfather farmed Bihar land for the whole of his life after partition. He worked soil he did not fully own, for margins he could not control, inside a system built around his productivity and not his rights. He died there. The land took him back.
Seventy-five years later I am reading about women in Maharashtra, farmers in Punjab, daughters in Haryana, and recognising the same face in every story. Different states, different crops, different decades. The same architecture underneath.
That recognition has not left me since.
Where Does This Leave the Conversation?
The stories circulating right now deserve to be read as a connected narrative, not as separate tragedies from separate regions. They connect to an agrarian crisis that is old, politically managed, and structurally reproduced rather than accidentally recurring.
India is building something real. The growth numbers are not fiction. But whether that construction is reaching the people whose labour makes it possible is a question that deserves a straight answer, not another five-year plan.
My grandfather stayed with his land until the end. Somewhere in Maharashtra right now, a woman is on her feet in a sugarcane field, having paid a surgeon to keep her there. The decades between them are full of policies, promises, and inquiry panels.
The land remembers. The farmers have never been allowed to forget.
This essay draws on personal family memory, published data from India's National Crime Records Bureau, the Maharashtra government's 2019 inquiry into hysterectomies in the sugarcane belt, British Safety Council data on Beed, and publicly available reporting on India's farm crisis.
Transparency note: AI tools assisted in drafting and structuring this piece. All reflections, family references, and editorial positions are the author's own.
Outbound sources to link:
- Neha Timande, Womb-less Economic Coercion (Medium, 2025)
- NCRB Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India reports (farmer suicide data)
- Maharashtra Government Inquiry Report, 2019 (Beed hysterectomy)
- British Safety Council, Beed data citation
- P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Bihar/agrarian poverty context)
- Economic Survey of India, agriculture budget allocation data
- The Wire / Scroll.in, 2020-21 farm protest coverage
