Exploring vulnerability of SC-ST tenant farmers in Telangana in the context of Rythu Bandhu and Rythu Bima schemes

India is currently the 5th largest global economy. Agricultural production contributes 20% to its GDP with 55% of the total Indian workforce working in this sector. Yet, 70.4% of the total agricultural households are either landless or hold a meagre amount of cultivable land, leading to a higher volume of cultivation under tenancy. With 20% of Indian farmers living below the poverty line, indebtedness is one of the core problems among farmers across India. In Financial Year 2016-17, the southern state of Telangana had the highest rate of agricultural indebtedness which was most acute among the farmers from the historically marginalised Dalit and Adivasi communities in the region. To address indebtedness, the Government of Telangana came up with two simultaneous sister initiatives, The Rythu Bandhu Scheme and Rythu Bima in 2018. Surprisingly, the most vulnerable section of the farmers, the landless tenant farmers, have been explicitly excluded from both the schemes. Therefore, this re-search seeks to understand how the exclusion by the state from both the schemes has af-fected the Dalit and Adivasi tenant farmers in terms of their indebtedness from the inter-twining factors of class and caste. To this end, an ethnographic route of qualitative research, using tools of sample survey, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation of 35 Dalit and Adivasi landless tenant farmers in totality, have been taken. The key findings of this research have been the reaffirmation of the caste and class hierarchical discrimination by the state actors-affiliates through its socio-political mechanism and strategical formation of policy which only do welfare of the solvent and wealthy elite class of the society. The schemes have not in any way provided relief to the SC-ST landless tenant farmers from their indebt-edness. Rather, as the schemes created an additional income source for absentee upper and dominant caste landlords, the side effects of the schemes have been disastrous. Increase in monetary value of the agricultural lands making it unaffordable, higher rent of the leased lands and accelerated cost of agricultural input components have forced the landless SC-ST farmers more into indebtedness. So, instead of the facade of ‘welfare schemes for the farm-ers’ by the state, this dissertation came up with the recommendation based on the research participants suggestions of immediate initiation of the land redistribution which has long been pending by the current ruling Telangana government since it came to power in 2014. vii Also, for including the actual indebted farmers, state mechanism of identifying the tenant farmers, empowering the local governmental offices is a timely requirement. Finally, putting a cap on the total number of land holdings per family as a single unit as an eligibility criterion for reception of Rythu Bandhu and Rythu Bima should be proposed.