Millionaire Mode

Directions: Choose the word which is most opposite in meaning to the word printed in bold as used in the passage.

RIGGED

Directions: Read the passage below and answer the question that follows:

The farmer often goes by the dealer's advice on what products to buy. "The dealer has emerged as an 'expert', because the others have gone,” says Malla Reddy. The APRS leader points to "over 2,800 vacancies in the Department of Agriculture.” Many farmer suicides in the State have been largely debt driven which makes the seed dealer's role more of a problem. Some of those who took their lives did so because of both huge debts and crop failures due to spurious seeds and pesticides. But there is little punishment for those selling fake seeds. The matter gets more complex given the clout the seed dealers have gained and the alarming rise in the cost of inputs they control. Per acre costs have exploded since 1996.

Pesticide, ammonia phosphate, zinc – all these have more than doubled in cost. A farmer might buy most of these inputs from the same dealer. Other expenses, too, have risen. Tractors cost a lot more than manual work did. Those who left food crops to experiment with cash crops in this period pay even more. The 24 percent interest that seed dealers tag on makes the burden worse. With seed companies hawking a "germination rate" of only 65 percent, farmers get even less value for money. Input costs are higher in coastal regions where, too, suicides have been on the rise. The use of high cost items such as fertilizers and pesticides is greatest in Andhra Pradesh. The All–India average for fertilizer consumption per hectare was 88 kg in 2001. In Andhra Pradesh it was almost 180 kg. It is even greater in the coastal regions. "Over use of fertilizer is a huge problem," says Malla Reddy of the APRS.

"At the same time," he says "tenant farmers faced massive increases in the cost of leasing land." Such tenants make up nearly 60 percent of all farmers in many parts of the State, more so in the coastal region. From the late 1990s, they were asked by the landlords to pay (as lease cost) between 21 and 25 bags of paddy an acre each year. This, when their output was barely 30 bags an acre. So the tenant farmer is left with five bags of paddy and another three of black gram that he sows after paddy. And that is in a good year!" The huge use of fertilizer has not helped much." "But at the moment when input costs were so high and rewards so poor," says the Nalgonda ex–MLA, Narasimha Reddy, "the banks stopped giving the farmer any credit and output prices were crashing due to rigged and volatile markets. There was also zero investment in agriculture. This crisis was man–made." That was how the suicides began. "Add drought and crop failure to that," says Reddy, "and the suicides only got worse."