The situation for India's more than 260 million agricultural workers is dire. Nearly 30 people in the farming sector die by suicide daily, according to the most recent figures available, typically due to overwhelming debt. Indeed in 2020, more than 10,000 people in the agricultural sector ended their own lives, according to government data. India's economic backbone -- its farmers and their families -- is in collapse. They face crushing pressures: insurmountable debt, environmental degradation, and extreme rates of cancer linked to exposure to pesticides. This strain is compounded by climate change and extreme weather -- from ground water depletion to water shortages and crop damage due to rising temperatures -- effects which have been tied to increasing suicides in India. Farming is a notoriously economically unstable industry globally, but farmers in India find themselves buried under densely layered problems. Many are subsistence farmers who are drowning in the volatility caused by the Green Revolution which began in the 1960s as a way of industrializing the agriculture sector with high yielding seeds, mechanized tools and pesticides. In some cases, farmers cannot work their land due to illness linked to the revolution's pesticides and fertilizers. They are dealing with deep-rooted battles against multinational corporations. And all the while having to take out loans each year to make the agricultural cycle possible. And then, when farmers are unable to get loans from legitimate banks, illegal moneylenders -- or loan sharks -- step in, charging exorbitant interest rates and creating an inescapable debt-trap for farmers, in some instances pushing them to suicide. The state of Punjab where we visit, is known as the breadbasket of India.
Ukrainian forces had blown up a bridge that leads south from that town into Kyiv, leaving only a small walkway over a river, just wide enough for one or two people to cross at a time.
Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk after he was injured by shrapnel on March 6
Jerome Sessini—Magnum Photos
As the photographers arrived, they saw a couple of vans near the bridge, waiting to take civilians to safety as they made it over. Many of those crossing were elderly. Others had babies in strollers and pets under their arms. A group of Ukrainian soldiers stood nearby. Dondyuk had stopped to take their photographs when they heard the first mortar incoming. It was the start of an assault that would last for around two hours, targeting the only pathway for civilians to flee Irpin.
The soldiers at the bridge fell back as the bombing continued. But Dondyuk and his two colleagues stayed to document the scene, retreating only after a piece of shrapnel hit him in the shoulder, ripping away a piece of flesh. Scores of civilians were injured or killed in the attack. Yet they kept streaming across the bridge even as the bombs were falling. “They could see the mortars ahead of them. They could see the bodies,” says Dondyuk. “But whatever they were running away from, it must have been worse.”
—With reporting by Nik Popli
A woman seeks shelter from Russian artillery and aerial bombardment in Kyiv’s subway system on March 2. Thousands like her have retreated underground, and some have not left the tunnels since the fighting began
Maxim Dondyuk
A maternity unit moved to the basement of their hospital in Kyiv on March 2 after a bombing nearby
Maxim Dondyuk
Civilians cross the Irpin river, near Kyiv, on March 5, where a bridge was destroyed by the Ukrainian army to stop Russian forces from advancing
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