Are farmers' suicides in India hyped to divert funds, attract attention?

By Sumit Mitra Doesn’t everybody love a good drought? Sure, and so does he love to shudder each time there is news about a farmer ending his life. Nobody bothers to get into the details of the reason for the suicide. Did he die for the fear of the moneylender catching up soon? Did he dabble with a GM seed that he knew little about and finally ended up with huge costs and no buyer? Did he blow all his money on drinks? Had he put his money in a rogue chit fund whose agent disappeared one fine morning? On the other hand, did he find quite irresistible the lure of his name appearing on the national media for at least a day, like with Rajasthan farmer Gajendra Singh, perhaps, who hanged himself Wednesday from the branch of a tree in Delhi when an AAP rally was going on under him? Death wish too may have a bandwagon effect. [caption id=“attachment_2211566” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Farmer Gajendra Singh during Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s rally against the Union government’s Land Acquisition Bill at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on Wednesday. He committed suicide later. PTI[/caption] But is farmer suicide really so different from general suicide? The answer is, no. Let us take a look at the numbers. Occupational break-up of the population in 2011 Census is not out yet, which is a shame, but the category of “farmer” can include the 127.3 million cultivators and 106.9 million landless labourers mentioned in the provisional table. They add up to 234.2 agriculturists; call them farmer, if you like. Of them, 13,754 committed suicide, if figures obtained by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) are to be believed. It is 0.0058 percent. In contrast, there were 187,000 ‘general suicides’ in that year among a total population (2011 Census) of 1028,610,000. It works out to 0.0181 percent. It is clear, therefore, that the rate of general suicide is a full 3.6 times higher than the suicide rate among the so-called farmers. Some scholars (e.g., A. Das in the International Journal of Social Psychology, January 2011, vol. 57, No. 1) have extrapolated 2001 Census figures to arrive at the opposite conclusion that there were 12.9 farmer suicides per 100,000 farmer population against 10.6 general suicides among as many general people. It may be skewed due to inadequate NCRB data in the early days of computer use, and outdated because of soaring general population and a sharp drop during the decade in the share of farmers in the total population. It is not the intention of this article to suggest that farmers do not have a cause. Sure they have, the biggest of them being that most things that men did on the field are now done by machines, more quickly and profitably. Besides, the Indian farmer neither possesses the skills nor the resources to move to other professions, like the peasantry moved out of farms across the Western world in the half-a-century till the First World War (1914). Added to that is the difficulty in obtaining the inputs—water, fertilizers, pesticides—not to speak of the exorbitant cost of capital and access to market. It can be said in all fairness that the Indian farmer is doomed anyway. But the shrill campaigning about farmers suicide is a clever ploy to divert attention, and funds. The Gajendra Singh tragedy couldn’t have been timelier for the Congress, with its star leader Rahul Gandhi desperately looking for such emotional factoids to go with his main narrative that there will be no land acquisition except in the way his mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had wished it to be in the 2013 law. Farmer suicide is also a tried template for targeted state spending. Rs 6,530 crore were spent in 2008 for agricultural debt waiver and debt relief scheme. Five lakh rupees were given to each farmer in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra to repay loans. There were substantial relief packages in 31 districts of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala where farmer suicides were reported. Maharashtra enacted a stringent anti-money lending law in 2008, and soon made it illegal for unlicensed moneylenders to demand repayment of past loans. By 2012, Kerala too set up its debt relief commission. The entire exercise, though humane, is quite pointless because the farmer is no different from any other Indian, nor is he more prone to commit suicide than, say, college student or industrial worker. But everybody loves a good ‘farmer suicide’.