How do you find a bride? The new struggle in crisis-hit rural India

As climate change, low earnings and high debts batter them, young male farmers can’t find women willing to marry them.

Yavatmal/Mumbai, India — On a warm Sunday afternoon in April, a group of farmers sits on a roadside bench at the intersection of the highway with their village, Raveri, in the Yavatmal district of western India’s Maharashtra state.

One of them, Bhushan Unde, 31, has his phone out and is looking for a meme on Instagram. He finds it and gathers the group around him. Unde also works at the local government hospital as a computer operator.

The meme has a man, nearly their age who, like Unde, cannot find a bride. So, he devises an alternative: he dresses up in a groom’s finery and then goes on to put the wedding garland around his own neck. ‘If you can’t get a bride, just marry yourself!’, he says at the end. The group bursts out into loud laughter, but the burst is a short one. The joke hits home.

“This is the truth,” Unde says, only half-smiling. “I think we will all have to resort to exactly this now.”

As millions of Indians vote in the world’s largest election, spread out over nearly seven weeks, inflation, unemployment and underemployment have emerged as key voter concerns, even as religion, caste and the personal popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi also vie for their attention.

But in the heartland of India’s agrarian distress, Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, where thousands of farmers die by suicide each year, a new struggle is taking root: a marriage crisis. A combination of climate change and government policies that farmers say do not work for them is leaving male farmers teetering on the brink of financial precarity.

In a conservative society where men constitute more than three-quarters of