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  • 2 days ago
Anil Jadhav is an Indian farmer. He had always dreamed of having a large family. But as droughts in his homeland increase, his income — and marriage prospects — are dwindling.

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00:00I had many dreams. We'd have children, we'd spend our life happily, but those dreams remained unfulfilled.
00:30I feel very sad. It hurts because loneliness is very painful.
00:47I would say India is a positive child of climate change.
00:59Everything was good 40 years ago. Farming was a status symbol. Now it has become a curse.
01:16Maratwada is a dry region. Agriculture here is entirely dependent on rainfall. Because
01:35there is less rain here, we can't find women willing to marry. In every village, 100 to
01:40150 young men are not married.
01:50My dream was good. I wanted to get married, care for my parents and farm. I just wanted everything to be good.
02:00My mother is worried about me. She says, I'm alive today, but maybe not tomorrow. What will happen to you?
02:15She says, you should find a girl and get married. But I am not able to find a girl to marry.
02:21Families of girls come and see me, then they leave. They say, we don't like that one. In the last ten years, this has happened to me six or seven times.
02:35They want farming and another job. They want everything. But you can't find everything in one place.
03:03They say there's no water here. Why should we send our daughter here? That's the problem I face.
03:10I have to do what my parents used to do. I've been farming for 15 years. I won't get another job.
03:22For me, farming is like taking care of my mother. I must do it till my last breath.
03:29But I need both. A partner in life is also important.
03:40Hello, sir.
03:42Hi, Anil. How are you?
03:44I'm good, sir. How are you?
03:46Okay. Where do you live?
03:48Borsar. The area is Vajjapur.
03:58This is Sawanki. Shweta Sawanki. Her wedding has been fixed. I made the match.
04:03Sampat Bhagwat Lakkar. March 13, 1992. That's his date of birth. His father is also a farmer. And he lives in Osmanabad.
04:22Many sons of farmers come to me. They want to get married. They send me their profiles on WhatsApp. I forward it to the girl's family. The girl's family looks at it and says, no, we don't like him.
04:37So I tell the boy's family that the girl has said no. They say, sir, please do something. They treat me like God. He will get us married. But how do I tell them?
04:51No matter how good a farmer he is, nobody wants to give their daughter to him. Because of the drought, people don't like the prospects there. There's no income or income source.
05:04What happened to me could happen to someone else. This worried me a lot. We were very poor. No girl wanted to marry me. I didn't even have a home.
05:14Our land was much smaller, about one to two acres. For one to two acres of land, nobody wanted to marry me.
05:22My father used to work in the sugar industry. In 1985 it shut down. We had a lot of bad days. Sometimes we slept hungry.
05:31I really want farmer's sons to be able to get married. We work for them for free. We don't charge them any money.
05:38Money is not God, but it is still important. What I have faced, other people have also faced. That's why I started this.
05:49This is fenugreek. And this here is coriander. And over there is corn.
05:56If it rains, we have some income. If it doesn't rain, there's nothing.
06:00Sometimes there's no rain. Sometimes there is. That's why we face a lot of problems in agriculture.
06:16If you look at the last 70 years, we see a decline in this monsoon rainfall, which is like almost 15, 20 percent decline in the total amount of rainfall.
06:27So we are not getting that much amount of rainfall that we used to get earlier.
06:32Even whatever we are getting are in a short spell of time.
06:36We see that if you had somewhere around three widespread extreme rainfall events per year in the 1950s,
06:45now it is like about eight or nine events per year.
06:49It's not always climate change, but also management.
06:52Palms have been drilling deep and extracting ground water, depleting it across Maratwada, Maharashtra and all.
07:01Water which has come there after centuries of filtration.
07:06All this results in poor yields, and you see people are migrating across India.
07:12I got married in 2017. After being in a relationship for two years, we decided to get married.
07:28Earlier, people would keep the women inside the house. They would beat them, make them work.
07:33Now, women can have their own jobs. They can do anything for themselves.
07:40It's not that girls don't want to get married, but they feel that they should find a husband and move away.
07:46That's how girls think these days. They don't want to work in the fields.
07:50Girls just want a free environment.
07:52One of the collegiace with women, daughters and daughters, especially women,
07:54and we don't know what academics has.
07:55That's how they aim for them, and it's self-employed and who put their past rails on the horizon
07:59and views on the horizon.
08:00So girls, mainly care and수를 attract them as well as being able to save the planet.
08:08And communicate their children itself through borders on the horizon.
08:14Absolutely.
08:15And not their families are doing granted overnight,
08:16Unfortunately.
08:17You look forward to us when building with these are about DDR2 women.
08:19It's been 10 years. I was 26 years old then. I am 35 now. I wanted a life partner and someone to take care of our home.
08:42That's when I got married. It was through an agent. They said the girl's family needed money. They were poor. So we gave them money. I spent 300,000 rupees, but she left. People just wanted to make money. I loved her a lot, but slowly I'm trying to forget her. When I miss her, I start to drink. I became addicted to alcohol out of loneliness.
09:12This problem has become worse in the past 15 to 20 years. Farmer's sons have been taking to alcohol and other substances because they can't find women to marry. There's no peace in their homes.
09:29Have you been farming since childhood? Yes, since childhood.
09:34Okay, it must be tough to get married. Nobody wants to give their daughter to a farmer.
09:41Yes, that's the problem, sir. Please do your best. Please try to do something. Yes, of course. I will do my best.
09:50We need to have policies considering that this is not a one-time event. This is going to intensify further into the future. How you manage the water, how you manage the policies for agriculture. No one is safe, which means that we need to act immediately, not just for India, for other countries as well.
10:14The food prices over there also will go up because they are depending on the food grains from India.
10:22In our home, it's just my mother and I. My mother is 80 years old.
10:29There's no one to take care of her, so I feel for her. It was very hard for me to forget my former wife. Everyone is running after money.
10:39I have not thought about the future. It will be as it must be.
11:09I'm sorry, fuck my mother, która. My family and I am not sure.
11:17I have not thought about it again.
11:20Look, I said you are all theなた.
11:21Sorrow is a thing in life that makes you stronger and takes you forward.
11:30The problem is that many people don't want to compromise. Marriage means the more you compromise, the happier you will be.
11:37So how much do you make from farming in a year?
11:45Income, about 100,000 rupees.
11:48100,000?
11:50Yes.
11:51That is very little.
11:55Nothing is really in my hands. Everything is in God's hands, sir.
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