7 states share 87% of farmer suicides

Maharashtra tops the list followed by Karnataka, Telangana, MP, AP, Chhattisgarh, and Tamil Nadu.

The New Year has opened up on a rather depressing note. A day after the partying was over, the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) released its latest report on farmer suicides. Accordingly, the trend shows a steep rise with 12,602 farmers committing suicide in 2015, the latest year for which data has been collected.

On an average, one farmer, ended his own life every 41 minutes somewhere in India. Compiling the farm suicides figures released officially so far, between 1995 and 2015, a period of 21 years, a total of 3,18,528 farmers have committed suicide.

This is nothing but a serial death dance being enacted on the farm. Call it by any name, the unending saga of farmer suicides is certainly an outcome of the faulty economic policies being initiated all these years whereby farmers have been deliberately kept impoverished.

Agriculture has been systematically rendered economically unviable as a result of which farmers have been pushed into a vicious cycle of indebtedness. Even in Punjab, the food bowl of the country, while farm incomes have remained static, farm indebtedness has multiplied 22 times in the past decade.

True to what former Prime Minister Charan Singh had once said (“a farmer is born in debt and dies in debt”), the appalling distress levels have only worsened. Even the latest NCRB data shows mounting indebtedness and farm-related issues to be the primary reason of farmer suicides. The other two main causes – poverty and illness, too can be clubbed in the same category. Both are related directly to declining incomes.

And how deeply the farmers are buried under indebtedness becomes evident from a study done by the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research on Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID). According to it, 96% of the rural households in Punjab have incomes lower than the expenses. In all, 98% of the rural families remain indebted.

With 4,291 suicides recorded, Maharashtra tops the chart. This is a little higher from the 4,004 farm suicides reported a year earlier, in 2014. For two consecutive years — 2014 and 2015 — Maharashtra has been holding the dubious distinction with a third of the total farm suicides reported in the country happening within its borders.

In addition, Karnataka, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are the states with a large number of farm suicides. Nearly 87% suicides - a total of 11,026 - have been collated from these seven states. If we look at the country’s map, these states are closely knit geographically and form a big farm suicide region extending from central India to the coastal regions.

No farmer suicides have been reported from Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Mizoram and Goa. But Bihar has reported seven suicides among farm workers, Tamil Nadu 604, Jharkhand 21, and Madhya Pradesh 709.

If I were to include both cultivators/ farmers in one category, the death toll of 12,602 persons who died on the farm in 2015 is 2% higher than the toll of 12,360 reported a year earlier, in 2014. This confusion of segregating farmers and agricultural workers separately happened last year because the government wanted to show a decline in suicide numbers.

Agri workers

Adding the death toll in both the categories – 5,650 farmers and 6,710 agricultural workers, the total for 2014 came to 12,360, which was 5% higher than the farmer suicides that happened in 2013. In other words, farm suicides have been on an upswing despite the valiant efforts to downplay the tragedy. For instance, the latest NCRB data shows 100 farmers committing suicide in Punjab in 2015. In addition, 24 agricultural workers have ended their lives.

The total farm suicides recorded in Punjab therefore comes to 124. This is far less than the 449 farm suicides that the Punjab government has officially acknowledged. The effort to downplay suicides emerges from a trend that Chhattisgarh started in 2011 when it began showing zero farm suicides, four in 2012 and again zero in 2013. In the latest data, 954 farm suicides have been recorded in Chhattisgarh.

Unfortunately, political leaders as well as policy makers have preferred to gloss over the bloo­dy crisis, and instead policy planning is aimed at creating econo­mic hardship that forces farmers to move out of agriculture, so as to provide cheaper workforce for infrastructure, construction and real estate projects.

The projections being made by the National Skill Development Council makes this abundantly clear. In the next five years, by 2022, it aims to reduce the work force in agriculture from the existing 57% to 38%.

Pushing people out of agriculture to migrate to urban cities is not the way forward. The challenge lies in making farming economically viable and sustainable.

But since 1995, successive governments led by prime ministers — P V Narasimha Rao, H D Deve Gowda, I K Gujral, A B Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh – have failed to provide any succor to the dilapidated farming sector. One hopes Prime Minister Narendra Modi turns 2017 into a dream year for farmers.