Afew years ago, Kalawati Bandurkar was just another Indian farmer eking out a back-breaking existence from a few acres of land. Life was hard - but this was true for everyone in the village of Jalka in Vidarbha region, a remote corner of India's western Maharashtra state.

Then events took a tragic turn. Kalawati's husband, Parashuram, who had long been preoccupied by the family's crippling debt burden, began acting strangely. Often he would just sit by the road, running over the numbers in his head, wondering how he was going to repay his loans as well as marry off his seven daughters and buy seeds for the next cotton crop.