It's clearly a case of misplaced priorities as far as governance goes. Over the last two years, the Maharashtra government has developed an unprecedented inclination towards the wine industry even as thousands of desperate cotton farmers caught in a debt trap in the eastern Vidarbha region of the state are committing suicide by consuming pesticide.

In sharp contrast, in Nasik, Sangli and Pune on the west, wine producers and vineyard owners are uncorking the champagne.

Why are a few wineries more important to Pawar, who has a grape variety named after him, than 20 lakh cotton growers?

Wine production in 2005 was up 81 per cent from the previous year. From just three wineries in 2000, there are 36 today, with 10 more expected to start crushing this season. While no one really grudges the grape growers and wineries their favoured status, questions are being raised on why other farm sectors are being ignored. Says Dr Ajay Dandekar, who works on rural development issues at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information, Communication and Technology, "Cotton has always suffered stepmotherly treatment. First, it was sugarcane which was favoured, now it is wine."

In fact, the prognosis has never been so good for the wine industry and vineyards in Maharashtra. Every few months, a new sop is announced: a simplified licensing procedure for new wineries; plans to eliminate excise duty, already down from 100 per cent to 25 per cent; and the classification of wineries as a food processing industry to avail of the soft loans offered by the food processing department. Two wine parks have been set up in Sangli and Nasik, providing infrastructure to wineries, including a one-year diploma course on wine management. Besides, Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is busy championing the cause of wine, arguing that it be treated as a soft drink rather than an alcoholic beverage. After all, what better way to boost domestic consumption than by making wine more accessible?

With wine being seen as a sunshine industry, the government has little time to keep track of suicides in the cotton belt of eastern Maharashtra. Around year-end, it reluctantly admitted to over 1,000 farmer suicides in the state since 2001. Social workers peg the number at three times that. Even the Rs 1,045-crore relief package announced by the state government in the assembly session at Nagpur early December is little more than an eyewash. "Of this package, Rs 700 crore is the farmers' own money," says Vijay Javandia, Vidarbha's leading farm activist. The capital-formation fund of the Maharashtra State Cotton Growers' Federation derives its cash from farmer contributions. The government's dissolution of the fund last October only makes it harder for the federation to raise bank loans, and therefore to purchase cotton from farmers under the Cotton Monopoly Procurement Scheme.

The Cotton Federation, set up in 1972, is grappling with losses to the tune of Rs 5,000 crore. This has forced farmers to sell their cotton to private traders at prices way below the minimum support price (MSP). What's more, the advance bonus of Rs 550 normally added to the MSP was scrapped last October, bringing the price per quintal of cotton from Rs 2,250 to Rs 1,700. This is Rs 1,000 less per quintal than what the Congress promised the cotton farmer in exchange for his vote. "If you look at what we've lost because of the advance bonus being scrapped, you'll see that the Centre has withdrawn Rs 1,100 crore from one pocket and put less than Rs 300 crore in the other," says Javandia.

Vidarbha, which accounts for only 11 parliamentary seats out of a total of 48 in Maharashtra, has always played second fiddle to western Maharashtra. Consider the numbers: the import duty on bottled wine's been raised from 100 per cent to 150 per cent, but 15-20 lakh bales of imported cotton flood our market annually, says Javandia, suppressing cotton prices to please a politically powerful textile lobby.

On the other hand, the government machinery has indeed extended itself to support the grape growers. The National Horticulture Board (NHB) picks up 20 per cent of the cost of setting up a vineyard, offering subsidies of up to Rs 60,000 per acre. There is also a range of infrastructure and crop loans being offered by private and nationalised banks to the wine sector, at competitive interest rates of between 8 and 12 per cent. "With the government promoting us in such a big way, banks are practically running behind us now," says Sopan Kanchan, chairman of the Grape Growers' Federation of India.

Cotton farmers haven't been as lucky. A credit crunch is central to the cotton crisis, with interest rates of 14-17 per cent being charged when nationalised and cooperative banks give loans to cotton farmers. And as high as 120 per cent if private moneylenders are tapped. With banks unwilling to lend and a government crackdown on private lenders since November, cotton farmers have no credit source but the input dealers (agents of pesticide and seed manufacturers) who supply inputs on credit in return for harvested cotton at cut-throat rates.

While west Maharashtra's grape growers enjoy a captive market in the wineries, Vidarbha's cotton has no assured buyers apart from the monopoly procurement scheme. Which Dandekar calls "a big joke" because farmers are paid eight months after the crop's been carted away. Those in need of instant cash settle for far lower prices from private traders who smuggle the cotton to Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. "The mills in Vidarbha have collapsed out of neglect," says Dandekar. "And the big Mumbai-based textile houses want imported cotton."

Input costs have also skyrocketed in the last 15 years. Some, like seeds, by over 200 per cent, others like di-ammonium phosphate by 300 per cent. Cotton prices have done a terrible job of keeping up—the Rs 1,700 per quintal now being offered is what farmers were getting in 1994. Last March, Dandekar conducted a study on the cotton crisis at the behest of the Bombay High Court—it pointed to big, policy-driven failures. According to Dandekar, investment in the rural sector has fallen from 14.5 per cent of the GDP to a third of that amount. So has plan outlay on agriculture. The national employment growth rate in the rural areas has plummeted from 2.4 per cent (1983-1994) to 0.6 per cent (1994-2000). Agricultural subsidies are much lower than the 10 per cent as per the Agreement on Agriculture ratified at Marrakesh in 1994, this at a time when US subsidies run to $54 billion and EU subsidies are more than twice that. "Sixty per cent of our population is locked up in rural areas where there is negligible capital formation and no alternatives," says Dandekar.

In any case, experts contend that even the substantial incentives offered to the wine industry are swallowed up by a handful of big wineries. Pawar—he even has a grape variety, Sharad Seedless, named after him—must explain why the future of a few large wineries is more important than the livelihood of 20 lakh cotton cultivators. Perhaps the state administration will wake up only when it's election time. In Maharashtra, which went to the polls last year, that's four long years away.