Hyderabad, Aug. 11 -- Debt has been used as an age-old modus operandi by the wealthy and powerful to take away the lands from the farmers. The money lenders use several ways to push the farmers into a debt spiral. With the interest on the debt, which compounded their problems to a stage of becoming bad debt, the farmers ultimately get dispossessed of their lands.

The case of the cotton seed farmers in Jogulamba Gadwal district is just one of the vicious ways in which seed organisers (middlemen), mostly hailing from one politically powerful community, have been turning agricultural land owners into farm labourers in their own lands.

Boya Rajeshwari, a resident of Penchikalapadu village of Ghattu mandal in Jogulabda Gadwal district, is a ...