A NEW Bollywood film puts the spotlight on the sensitive issue of suicide in rural India, where some 150,000 farmers have taken their own lives in the past decade. Farming and related activities provide a livelihood for more than two-thirds of India's 1.1 billion people. While India, Asia's third-largest economy, grew 9 percent in 2007/08, an inescapable cycle of debt stalks the farmers of Vidarbha – an arid cotton-bearing plateau in central India. In "Summer 2007," which opened in Indian cinemas on Friday, five medical students from Mumbai stray into a village, unprepared for the deaths and misery they encounter there. The five students can do little to alleviate the suffering of the villagers and yet "Summer 2007" ends on a note of hope. "Nobody has a solution to farmer suicides. They're not able to write off the loans or get all the bad guys arrested," said Atul Pandey, the film's producer. "(But) they are able to carry a kind of compassion for the poor citizens of the country." The film also explores the possibility of micro credit as a solution and has a character inspired by Mohammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel peace prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh's biggest micro-credit institution. – Reuters __
