India's Killer Drought Pushing People to Suicide
The state of Tamil Nadu is now facing its worst drought in 140 years. India's government has promised aid, but little has come.
A few months after Radha Krishnan took his life, his wife, Rani, was holding her husband’s skull in her sun-beaten hands—the most powerful evidence she could find of a growing disaster back home. She had joined 1,000 farmers in traveling thousands of miles to New Delhi to demand a drought relief package for the farmers of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state.
Krishnan’s public suicide was a last, hopeless protest. In February 2017, after his crops had failed for the third year in a row and with no chance of repaying his loans, he sat on the street outside the local
