Farmer suicides – I fail at finding the point from where to begin on the topic. Countless newspaper columns, editorials and news hour debates have been constantly raising the alarm bells and rotating around the rising number of farmer suicides in India. Farmer suicides have become a part of everyday parlance and so common an occurrence that it fails to ascertain the gravity of the situation. Government and judiciary have tried to address this problem but in vain. India has lost 3000 of her farmers in the last three years according to the statistics given by Ministry of Agriculture.
The state of Maharashtra has recorded the highest number of farmer suicides this year. In July 2015, Karnataka faced over 50 farmer suicides in two weeks. Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala have been recording a rising number of farmer suicides year after year. These are the official statistics and it is obvious that there are many more cases to be unearthed or go unreported.
A serious agrarian crisis has formed in our country over a decade. Unpredictable climatic conditions have often betrayed the farmers. When we are unable to provide clean drinking water to every citizen, providing water to a drought affected farmland is a distant dream. Cost of cultivation has risen but not the income and thus the farmers are pushed into a debt trap. It is difficult to get loans for crop but they would get personal loans for marriage, festivals, education etc. Often farmers fall prey to loans sharks with high interest rates for education and marriage expenses. When their only hope for repayment gives poor results, farmers often are forced to find refuge in a bottle of pesticide.
It is sardonic, that in India when millionaires end up in debt (which also sums up in millions), our government is not at all hesitant to write off their debt immediately. But when it comes to the people who feed us, the declared benefits and concessions are delayed and denied. When debt amounting to crores can be tallied with the taxpayer’s money, famers are pushed to drastic measures like suicide for a loan of 30,000 Rupees. Not to mention our ministers who had a quixotic insensitivity to say to that love failure is the reason behind thousands of farmer suicides.
No industrialist, corporate, public or private sector employee works as hard as a farmer in India. It is his/her backbreaking toil that brings us meal to our plates. No price paid to him would be proportionate to the effort and dedication a farmer puts in. Though they feed our whole nation, we fall blind to their troubles. Though, they provide the basic human requirement, farmers are the last to receive the benefits of development and funds in India. The rising farmer suicides should be a priority for government authorities. But the guilt and shame of the farmers being reduced to mere statistics falls on every Indian citizen. We never know-
The farmer who reaped the grain we eat might be feeding poison to his family.
