Vilasrao Deshmukh clearly believes he has been merciful towards those committing the ‘crime’ of suicide. Thanks to his government’s generosity, close to 32,000 farmers who have taken their lives in his State since 1995 have gone scot-free.
“Committing suicide is an offence under the Indian Penal Code. But did we book any farmer for this offence? Have you reported that?” — Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh on farm suicides in Vidharbha.
That is the Chief Minister’s response to media questions on the ongoing farm suicides in Vidharbha. He has gone on record with that statement in an interview. (The Hindustan Times, October 31.) Leave aside for the moment this incorrect reading of the law. Mr. Deshmukh clearly believes he has been merciful towards those committing the ‘crime’ of suicide. Thanks to his government’s generosity, close to 32,000 farmers in his State wh o have taken their lives since 1995 go scot-free. Imagine what would happen should he decide to book them for their ‘crime.’ For the record, on average, one farmer committed suicide every three hours in Maharashtra between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has worsened to one such suicide every two-and-a-quarter hours. Those numbers emerge from official data. This could be the State’s worst tragedy in living memory.
Of course, the question arises: who would he punish if he decides to enforce what he believes is the law? And how would he do so? Would their ashes be disinterred from wherever to face the consequences of their actions? Would the awful majesty of the law be visited upon their survivors to teach them never to stray from the path of righteous conduct? Or — more likely — would his government set up yet another commission to look into the matter?
Under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, attempting suicide is a crime. A suicide effort that succeeds places the victim beyond Mr. Deshmukh’s reach anyway. Beyond anything for that matter. As one of India’s foremost legal minds says: “the odd thing about suicide in India is that failing to commit it is a crime. One who succeeds in it is obviously beyond punishment. But the one who fails in his attempt to commit it could be in trouble. You could then be booked for ‘attempted suicide,’ an offence punishable by fine and even imprisonment.”
Abetment to suicide (Section 306) is also a crime. One that places Mr. Deshmukh’s government in the dock if we persist with this logic of ‘punishment.’ His Ministry has been widely criticised on the farm suicides in this State. Many point to the rash of suicides that occurred soon after the government withdrew the ‘advance bonus’ of Rs.500 per quintal of cotton in 2005. A move that tanked cotton prices and brought disaster to lakhs of farmers in the State.
Worse, his is a government which came to power that very year on a promise of giving cotton farmers a price of Rs.2700 a quintal. At the time, they were getting a mere Rs.2200 a quintal. A sum the government conceded was quite uneconomical. Further, neither the State nor the Central government took any steps at all to counter the distortion of global cotton prices. Prices crashed as both the United States and the European Union piled on subsidies worth billions of dollars to boost their cotton sectors.
To top it all, the Deshmukh government withdrew the ‘advance bonus’ soon after coming to power. That brought the price down to just over Rs.1700 a quintal. And the Centre did not raise import duties on cotton despite desperate pleas for such an action. This allowed the large scale dumping of U.S. cotton on this country, further crushing the farmers here. No, Section 306 is not something Mr. Deshmukh’s government would want to look into too closely.
But to be fair to Mr. Deshmukh, he is neither unique nor alone in this mindset. There is something wrong with a society where suicide data are put together by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The idea is in-built: suicide is a crime. From that flows Mr. Deshmukh’s simple notion of punishment. But he did not author the idea. He simply took it to unknown levels of insensitivity. With this statement, the Chief Minister outdid his previous effort when he made remarks about Vidharbha’s farmers that caused a furore. Remarks that suggested that they were both lazy and less than honest. Of course, he soon rallied to say he had been “quoted out of context.” (The Hindu, September 15, 2007). So maybe he will do so this time, too.
But he has certainly got the law out of context. What does Section 309 of the IPC really say? It states that “whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such an offence shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year or with a fine or with both.”
Fact: even the British Raj seems never to have used Section 309 against Mahatma Gandhi or other fasting leaders. And they had the excuse to do so when faced with, for instance, fasts unto death. This surely had less to do with humane behaviour than the hope that leaders like Gandhi would succeed in their fast unto death and rid the empire of a menace. Still the fact is: they did not resort to Section 309.
Mr. Deshmukh’s words suggest that he is holding himself back with much effort. If governments do start enforcing Section 309, the damage would be huge. For every farm suicide that occurs, there are a fairly large number of attempts that fail. Mostly, the police do not press the issue too hard. Even they see the ill logic of oppressing someone in misery who tries, but fails, to take his or her own life. (Such pressures have in a few cases, triggered a second — successful — attempt at suicide.) Following the ‘punishment’ logic would make life a living hell for those already in despair.
Decriminalising attempted suicide
For decades, social and legal workers and activists have struggled to decriminalise attempted suicide. One of them is Dr. Lakshmi Vijay Kumar, a consultant with the World Health Organisation on suicide research and prevention. As she puts it: “It’s a crazy law. One which only a handful of nations still retain. Most others have withdrawn it years ago. Apart from us, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Singapore seem to still have this kind of law. Sri Lanka too did but withdrew it in 1998. It’s a law that punishes those most in need of help. A move to repeal it went through the Rajya Sabha in 1974. The bill was also introduced in the Lok Sabha but that house was dissolved before it could see it through.” The Section was even struck down by a Supreme Court ruling in 1994. However, it was later reinstated by a full bench.
As we write, the Maharashtra Assembly is in session. In the tiny Assembly session ahead, the question of farm suicides is sure to crop up. Why is Maharashtra, with more dollar billionaires and millionaires than any other State in the country, home to the largest number of farmers’ suicides in India? Why is it that farm suicides in this State trebled between 1995 and 2005? Why did they go up so massively in a State where suicides amongst non-farmers fell marginally in the same period?
All the data on farm suicides carried in The Hindu (Nov.12-15) are from the National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. They are not the data of this newspaper. Nor of Professor K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) who authored the study reported in the paper. They are government data. So if Mr. Deshmukh’s outfit has different numbers for the State Assembly, it could be in danger of committing contempt of the house.
Maybe someone in the house will raise other questions too. Queries that go, as they should, way beyond the suicides. The suicides are, after all, a tragic window to a much larger agrarian crisis. They are a symptom of massive rural distress, not the process. A consequence of misery, not its cause. How many more commissions will the government appoint to tell itself what it wants to hear? When will it address the problems of price, credit and input costs, for instance? When will it, if at all, reflect on the role of cash crops in the crisis? When will it push Delhi to set up a Centre-State price stabilisation fund? When will it dig its head out of the sand?
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
One farmer’s suicide every 30 minutes[15/11/07]
Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh have together seen 89,362 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2005.
On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes. However, the frequency at which farmers take their lives in any region smaller than the country — say a single State or group of States — has to be lower. Because the number of suicides in any such region would be less than the total for the country as a whole in any year. Yet, the frequency at which farmers are killing themselves in many regions is appalling.
On average, one farmer took his or her life every 53 minutes between 1997 and 2005 in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). In Maharashtra alone, that was one suicide every three hours. It got even worse after 2001. It rose to one farm suicide every 48 minutes in these Big Four States, and one every two and a quarter hours in Maharashtra alone. The Big Four have together seen 89,362 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2005, or 44,102 between 2002 and 2005.
K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), who has studied farmers’ suicides between 1997-2005 based on the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, divides the States into four groups. The worst of these is Group II which includes, besides the Big Four, the State of Goa which shows a high farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) — that is, suicides per 1,00,000 farmers. However, Goa’s rate is based on tiny absolute numbers. All Group II States have high general suicide rates (GSR) — suicides per 1,00,000 population — and have seen large numbers of farm suicides.
Of these, Andhra Pradesh shows some decline in 2005. And the government claims the numbers have fallen further in 2006. But there is no NCRB data to support this as yet. In all, if the NCRB data are valid, then Andhra Pradesh saw 16,770 suicides between 1997 and 2005.Decline in Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh was the first State after the 2004 polls to appoint a commission to go into the agrarian crisis. Based on the commission’s advice, it also took some steps towards handling that crisis. It restored compensation for the suicides that had been stopped by the previous regime in 1998. It persuaded creditors to accept a one-time settlement of debt in several cases. This possibly helped see a decline after the terrible years of 2002-04. However, Andhra Pradesh has begun to mimic Maharashtra in one unhappy aspect. The number of “non-genuine” cases — those the government does not accept as distress-linked — keeps mounting each month while the “genuine” suicides decline.
There are other problems too. Several States, notably Maharashtra, have made identification of farmers’ suicides extremely difficult by using indicators that rule out vast numbers from being categorised as such. One problem with such corruption of data is that it will eventually reflect in and distort future NCRB reports as well.
Karnataka too records some decline in 2004 and 2005, after a disastrous five-year period. And the State’s 15 per cent increase in non-farmers committing suicide in the 1997-2005 period is five times higher than the rise in farmers’ suicides (3 per cent). But the damage of those earlier years was huge. Karnataka saw as many as 20,093 farm suicides in the period. Again, it is unclear whether the lower numbers for 2004-05 were largely due to policy measures or whether there have been new and creative accounting techniques.
“Madhya Pradesh appears to have long been a problem State for farmers, though this has not been so far acknowledged,” says Professor Nagaraj. “The increase in farm suicides over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is not so high, at 11 per cent, but the absolute numbers have been very high for a long period. Much higher than in many other States. However, here too, the rise in non-farmer suicides, at 48 per cent, is more than four times the increase in farmers’ suicides.” Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) saw 23,588 farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. However, Madhya Pradesh has mostly escaped the media radar as a farm crisis State. In Group II States, farm suicides as a percentage of total suicides reached 21.9 in 2005 against a national average of 15.5. In short, more than one of every five persons taking his or her life in these States that year was a farmer. Also, one in every four suicides in this group was committed using pesticide.
One State outside the Big Four that has seen high numbers of farmers’ suicides is Kerala. It saw a total of 11,516 in 1997-2005. Worse, many of these occurred in small districts such as Wayanad. Kerala shows a fluctuating but declining trend over the nine-year period. The years 1998 to 2003 were clearly its worst period. More than 70 per cent of its farm suicides occurred in those years. From 2004, the numbers begin to drop. So much so that unlike the Big Four, it shows no increases in farm suicides for the whole period. The post-2003 fall, in fact, makes its overall figure minus 7 per cent.
Kerala created a “Debt Relief Commission” soon after the change in government there in 2005. The Commission held a case by case scrutiny of the debt problem, while the government halted aggressive loan recovery measures by banks and money lenders. On the Commission’s advice, the government also decided to declare the entire Wayanad revenue district distress-affected.Kerala still vulnerable
The improvement is quite fragile and could easily see a downturn. Kerala’s farm suicide rate for the period is very high, and the State remains vulnerable to volatility in the prices of, for instance, coffee, pepper, cardamom or vanilla. A fragility enhanced by the fact that major relief on the debt front requires Central help. Besides, State bureaucracies are extremely hostile to debt relief for farmers. Also, India’s free trade agreements with nations and neighbours that produce the same cash crops as Kerala hurts badly. The State’s balance on the farm suicides front is very delicate. Complacence would be, literally, fatal.
Group I States are those which have very high general suicide rates. That includes Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal, and Tripura. “However, Group I’s share of both total suicides and of farmers’ suicides declined between 1997 and 2005, even as that of Group II steadily rose,” points out Professor Nagaraj.
Group III States (Assam, Orissa, Gujarat, and Haryana) are those which have “moderate general and farm suicide rates,” while Group IV States (Bihar including Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh including Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Rajasthan) report “low general and farmers’ suicides rates.”
Generally speaking, the Gangetic plain region and eastern India have seen fewer farm suicides. States such as Uttar Pradesh (including Uttaranchal), Bihar (including Jharkhand) and Orissa report very few suicides of this kind. These States are in many respects the opposite of the Group II or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States. These are overwhelmingly food crop regions. They are not intensive input zones, and their costs of cultivation are much lower. Use of chemicals is not anywhere at the levels it is in the Group II States. Government support prices for food crop provide some minimal stability. And there is obviously a better water situation.
States such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat also report few farm suicides but their data have been challenged. Haryana, for instance, reports fewer suicides but its increase over the nine-year period was 211 per cent. This springs not from the recording of huge increases in recent years, but because the base year data appear highly flawed. For 1997, Haryana reports a spectacularly low 45 suicides. Which distorts the figure of increase in farm suicides across the period, pushing it upwards. “It could just have been that the counting operation was really shoddy or that it collapsed or was incomplete when data were sent in 1997,” says Professor Nagaraj. The numbers after the low 1997 figure remain roughly within a 170-210 range each year. Which again is strongly contested by farm unions and activists.
There are peculiar indications in Gujarat. Pesticide suicides — a common tool in farm suicides — are 84 per cent higher here than farm suicides. At the national level, they are just 28 per cent higher. Why is the gap three times bigger for Gujarat? Even for Group II States, pesticide suicides are only 21 per cent higher than farm suicides. Which raises the question whether several deaths in Gujarat ended up being recorded as just “pesticide suicides” without being acknowledged as suicides by farmers.
On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes. However, the frequency at which farmers take their lives in any region smaller than the country — say a single State or group of States — has to be lower. Because the number of suicides in any such region would be less than the total for the country as a whole in any year. Yet, the frequency at which farmers are killing themselves in many regions is appalling.
On average, one farmer took his or her life every 53 minutes between 1997 and 2005 in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). In Maharashtra alone, that was one suicide every three hours. It got even worse after 2001. It rose to one farm suicide every 48 minutes in these Big Four States, and one every two and a quarter hours in Maharashtra alone. The Big Four have together seen 89,362 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2005, or 44,102 between 2002 and 2005.
K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), who has studied farmers’ suicides between 1997-2005 based on the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, divides the States into four groups. The worst of these is Group II which includes, besides the Big Four, the State of Goa which shows a high farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) — that is, suicides per 1,00,000 farmers. However, Goa’s rate is based on tiny absolute numbers. All Group II States have high general suicide rates (GSR) — suicides per 1,00,000 population — and have seen large numbers of farm suicides.
Of these, Andhra Pradesh shows some decline in 2005. And the government claims the numbers have fallen further in 2006. But there is no NCRB data to support this as yet. In all, if the NCRB data are valid, then Andhra Pradesh saw 16,770 suicides between 1997 and 2005.Decline in Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh was the first State after the 2004 polls to appoint a commission to go into the agrarian crisis. Based on the commission’s advice, it also took some steps towards handling that crisis. It restored compensation for the suicides that had been stopped by the previous regime in 1998. It persuaded creditors to accept a one-time settlement of debt in several cases. This possibly helped see a decline after the terrible years of 2002-04. However, Andhra Pradesh has begun to mimic Maharashtra in one unhappy aspect. The number of “non-genuine” cases — those the government does not accept as distress-linked — keeps mounting each month while the “genuine” suicides decline.
There are other problems too. Several States, notably Maharashtra, have made identification of farmers’ suicides extremely difficult by using indicators that rule out vast numbers from being categorised as such. One problem with such corruption of data is that it will eventually reflect in and distort future NCRB reports as well.
Karnataka too records some decline in 2004 and 2005, after a disastrous five-year period. And the State’s 15 per cent increase in non-farmers committing suicide in the 1997-2005 period is five times higher than the rise in farmers’ suicides (3 per cent). But the damage of those earlier years was huge. Karnataka saw as many as 20,093 farm suicides in the period. Again, it is unclear whether the lower numbers for 2004-05 were largely due to policy measures or whether there have been new and creative accounting techniques.
“Madhya Pradesh appears to have long been a problem State for farmers, though this has not been so far acknowledged,” says Professor Nagaraj. “The increase in farm suicides over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is not so high, at 11 per cent, but the absolute numbers have been very high for a long period. Much higher than in many other States. However, here too, the rise in non-farmer suicides, at 48 per cent, is more than four times the increase in farmers’ suicides.” Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) saw 23,588 farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. However, Madhya Pradesh has mostly escaped the media radar as a farm crisis State. In Group II States, farm suicides as a percentage of total suicides reached 21.9 in 2005 against a national average of 15.5. In short, more than one of every five persons taking his or her life in these States that year was a farmer. Also, one in every four suicides in this group was committed using pesticide.
One State outside the Big Four that has seen high numbers of farmers’ suicides is Kerala. It saw a total of 11,516 in 1997-2005. Worse, many of these occurred in small districts such as Wayanad. Kerala shows a fluctuating but declining trend over the nine-year period. The years 1998 to 2003 were clearly its worst period. More than 70 per cent of its farm suicides occurred in those years. From 2004, the numbers begin to drop. So much so that unlike the Big Four, it shows no increases in farm suicides for the whole period. The post-2003 fall, in fact, makes its overall figure minus 7 per cent.
Kerala created a “Debt Relief Commission” soon after the change in government there in 2005. The Commission held a case by case scrutiny of the debt problem, while the government halted aggressive loan recovery measures by banks and money lenders. On the Commission’s advice, the government also decided to declare the entire Wayanad revenue district distress-affected.Kerala still vulnerable
The improvement is quite fragile and could easily see a downturn. Kerala’s farm suicide rate for the period is very high, and the State remains vulnerable to volatility in the prices of, for instance, coffee, pepper, cardamom or vanilla. A fragility enhanced by the fact that major relief on the debt front requires Central help. Besides, State bureaucracies are extremely hostile to debt relief for farmers. Also, India’s free trade agreements with nations and neighbours that produce the same cash crops as Kerala hurts badly. The State’s balance on the farm suicides front is very delicate. Complacence would be, literally, fatal.
Group I States are those which have very high general suicide rates. That includes Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal, and Tripura. “However, Group I’s share of both total suicides and of farmers’ suicides declined between 1997 and 2005, even as that of Group II steadily rose,” points out Professor Nagaraj.
Group III States (Assam, Orissa, Gujarat, and Haryana) are those which have “moderate general and farm suicide rates,” while Group IV States (Bihar including Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh including Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Rajasthan) report “low general and farmers’ suicides rates.”
Generally speaking, the Gangetic plain region and eastern India have seen fewer farm suicides. States such as Uttar Pradesh (including Uttaranchal), Bihar (including Jharkhand) and Orissa report very few suicides of this kind. These States are in many respects the opposite of the Group II or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States. These are overwhelmingly food crop regions. They are not intensive input zones, and their costs of cultivation are much lower. Use of chemicals is not anywhere at the levels it is in the Group II States. Government support prices for food crop provide some minimal stability. And there is obviously a better water situation.
States such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat also report few farm suicides but their data have been challenged. Haryana, for instance, reports fewer suicides but its increase over the nine-year period was 211 per cent. This springs not from the recording of huge increases in recent years, but because the base year data appear highly flawed. For 1997, Haryana reports a spectacularly low 45 suicides. Which distorts the figure of increase in farm suicides across the period, pushing it upwards. “It could just have been that the counting operation was really shoddy or that it collapsed or was incomplete when data were sent in 1997,” says Professor Nagaraj. The numbers after the low 1997 figure remain roughly within a 170-210 range each year. Which again is strongly contested by farm unions and activists.
There are peculiar indications in Gujarat. Pesticide suicides — a common tool in farm suicides — are 84 per cent higher here than farm suicides. At the national level, they are just 28 per cent higher. Why is the gap three times bigger for Gujarat? Even for Group II States, pesticide suicides are only 21 per cent higher than farm suicides. Which raises the question whether several deaths in Gujarat ended up being recorded as just “pesticide suicides” without being acknowledged as suicides by farmers.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Maharashtra: ‘graveyard of farmers’ [14/11/2007]
P. Sainath
30,000 farm suicides in a decade; Vidharbha worst place in nation to be a farmer.
Nearly 29,000 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra between 1997 and 2005, official data show. No other State comes close to that total. This means that of the roughly 1.5 lakh farmers who killed themselves across the country in that period, almost every fifth one was from Maharashtra — which saw a 105 per cent increase in farm suicides in those nine years. More than 19,000 of those farmer suicides occurred from 2001 onwards.
These dismal findings emerge from a major study of official data on farm suicides by K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS). Professor Nagaraj has analysed data recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Ministry of Home Affairs, from 1997 to 2005 (see Table). The study begins with 1997 because that was the year when most States began reporting farm data regularly.
However, Maharashtra is a State that did report farm data in 1995 and 1996, too. If we include those two years, then the number of farm suicides in the 1995-2005 period was almost 32,000. An increase of over 260 per cent between those years. Maharashtra is one of the country’s richest States. Its capital, Mumbai, is home to 25,000 of India’s 100,000 dollar millionaires.
Professor Nagaraj’s study shows that of the almost 1.5 lakh farm suicides in India between 1997 and 2005, over 89,000 occurred in just four States: Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). Importantly, Maharashtra accounts for a third of all farm suicides within these Big Four States. “This State,” says Professor Nagaraj, “could be called the graveyard of farmers.”
In terms of a percentage increase in farm suicides between 1997 and 2005, Andhra Pradesh’s figure is actually higher than that of Maharashtra. Andhra Pradesh saw a 127 per cent increase in farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. Then what makes Maharashtra worst amongst the Big Four? In all the other three States, suicides by non-farmers also rose massively in this period. Non-farmer suicides shot up 48 per cent in Andhra Pradesh, 48 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, and 15 per cent in Karnataka. The crisis was more generalised across sections of society.
In Maharashtra, suicides by non-farmers actually saw a decline of 2 per cent in those years. That means the intensity of the crisis was borne almost entirely by the farming community. So farm suicides rose steeply, even as non-farm suicides fell marginally.
The percentage increase in farm suicides for Andhra Pradesh (127 per cent) was higher than in Maharashtra (105 per cent) if we take the 1997-2005 period. However, these are both States where the data go back to 1995. Taking that year as the base, the percentage increase of farm suicides in Maharashtra was 263 per cent over 1995-2005. For Andhra Pradesh, it was 108 per cent over the same period. This translates into a very high annual compound growth rate (ACGR) of 7.6 per cent in farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh for the period 1995-2005. Which implies farm suicides there might double in 10 years if present trends hold. Maharashtra’s ACGR for the same period was 13.7. Which means farmers’ suicides here could double in six years, given the same trends.Door-to-door survey
Unlike for most States, some region-specific data on farm distress do exist in Maharashtra. Thanks to public action and activism, positive court intervention, and media pressure, the State Government was forced to keep some record, however flawed. Also, a paper by the then Divisional Commissioner, Amravati, S.K Goel, clearly recorded the situation in the Vidharbha region. Besides, the Maharashtra Government held the largest-ever door-to-door survey of its kind in the region in 2006. This study covered every farm household in Vidharbha’s six ‘crisis’ districts using 10,000 investigators. It captured a portrait of distress and crisis (The Hindu, Nov. 22, 2006).
It found that of the 17 lakh plus families covered, more than a fourth — that is, more than two million people — were “under maximum distress.” And more than three quarters of the rest were “under medium distress.” In short, almost seven million people were in distress. The major sources of such misery: debt and crop loss or crop failure (which often overlap). The pressure on farmers who cannot afford their daughters’ marriages. And rising health costs.
The paper by Dr. Goel, “Farmers’ Suicides in Maharashtra: An Overview,” placed some of this data on record. While his reading of some of the data does not hold up, his contribution to the study of the subject has been quite vital.
Among other things, the paper reveals that the total number of suicides in the six districts between 2001 and 2006 was extremely high at 15,980. Worse, the number went up from 2,425 in 2005 to 2,832 in 2006 — an increase of 407 in a single year. (And in 2006 both the Prime Minister’s and Chief Minister’s “relief packages” were at work.) The paper also confirms indebtedness as a factor in 93 per cent of farm suicides. The next highest factor being “economic downfall” — at 74 per cent.
However, only the state gets to decide which suicide is a “farmers’ suicide.” The Maharashtra Government’s efforts show much creative accounting. The Nagpur Bench of the Mumbai High Court compelled the government to maintain suicide statistics on its official website from mid-2006. But with a few exceptions, the media never really picked up the damaging data on the website. And the government was free to play with definitions of what was a “genuine” farm suicide.Jugglery
As a result, less than 20 per cent of the 15,980 suicides are by “farmers.” This, in overwhelmingly rural districts! (For instance, 80 per cent of Yavatmal’s population is rural.) And just a fraction of that — 1,290 cases — are accepted by the government as distress suicides worthy of compensation. This is achieved by inspired jugglery, as the accompanying table (I) shows.
The first columns give you total suicides each year. Take 2005 for instance, which saw 2,425 suicides in these districts. The next column is “Farmers’ Suicides.” Just 468 of them. Then an extraordinary column: “Family members’ suicides.” That figure is 559. That is, it holds that family members on the farm committing suicide are not farmers. This helps skim down the figure further. Next comes the total of these two followed by “Investigated cases.” The final column invents a new category unknown elsewhere: “Eligible suicides”. That is, suicides the government deems genuine and due for compensation. And so, for 2005, the suicides column that begins at 2,425 ends with 273. This amputated figure then, for propaganda purposes, becomes the number of “farmers’ suicides.” This way, a ‘decline’ in farm suicides is ‘established.’
The contortions are best seen in the category of “Eligible” suicides. Indeed, there is a whole separate table — not reproduced here — on “Percentage of eligible farmers suicides in six districts.” And of course, “Estimated eligible suicide cases” show a decline. So the number of suicides keeps mounting — but the number of farm suicides keeps falling! If accepted at face value, this jugglery would imply that only farmers are doing well.
Everybody else is sinking in Vidharbha. Read more seriously, the region specific data — viewed against the national and State figures — suggest that Vidharbha is today the worst place in the nation to be a farmer.
30,000 farm suicides in a decade; Vidharbha worst place in nation to be a farmer.
Nearly 29,000 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra between 1997 and 2005, official data show. No other State comes close to that total. This means that of the roughly 1.5 lakh farmers who killed themselves across the country in that period, almost every fifth one was from Maharashtra — which saw a 105 per cent increase in farm suicides in those nine years. More than 19,000 of those farmer suicides occurred from 2001 onwards.
These dismal findings emerge from a major study of official data on farm suicides by K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS). Professor Nagaraj has analysed data recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Ministry of Home Affairs, from 1997 to 2005 (see Table). The study begins with 1997 because that was the year when most States began reporting farm data regularly.
However, Maharashtra is a State that did report farm data in 1995 and 1996, too. If we include those two years, then the number of farm suicides in the 1995-2005 period was almost 32,000. An increase of over 260 per cent between those years. Maharashtra is one of the country’s richest States. Its capital, Mumbai, is home to 25,000 of India’s 100,000 dollar millionaires.
Professor Nagaraj’s study shows that of the almost 1.5 lakh farm suicides in India between 1997 and 2005, over 89,000 occurred in just four States: Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). Importantly, Maharashtra accounts for a third of all farm suicides within these Big Four States. “This State,” says Professor Nagaraj, “could be called the graveyard of farmers.”
In terms of a percentage increase in farm suicides between 1997 and 2005, Andhra Pradesh’s figure is actually higher than that of Maharashtra. Andhra Pradesh saw a 127 per cent increase in farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. Then what makes Maharashtra worst amongst the Big Four? In all the other three States, suicides by non-farmers also rose massively in this period. Non-farmer suicides shot up 48 per cent in Andhra Pradesh, 48 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, and 15 per cent in Karnataka. The crisis was more generalised across sections of society.
In Maharashtra, suicides by non-farmers actually saw a decline of 2 per cent in those years. That means the intensity of the crisis was borne almost entirely by the farming community. So farm suicides rose steeply, even as non-farm suicides fell marginally.
The percentage increase in farm suicides for Andhra Pradesh (127 per cent) was higher than in Maharashtra (105 per cent) if we take the 1997-2005 period. However, these are both States where the data go back to 1995. Taking that year as the base, the percentage increase of farm suicides in Maharashtra was 263 per cent over 1995-2005. For Andhra Pradesh, it was 108 per cent over the same period. This translates into a very high annual compound growth rate (ACGR) of 7.6 per cent in farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh for the period 1995-2005. Which implies farm suicides there might double in 10 years if present trends hold. Maharashtra’s ACGR for the same period was 13.7. Which means farmers’ suicides here could double in six years, given the same trends.Door-to-door survey
Unlike for most States, some region-specific data on farm distress do exist in Maharashtra. Thanks to public action and activism, positive court intervention, and media pressure, the State Government was forced to keep some record, however flawed. Also, a paper by the then Divisional Commissioner, Amravati, S.K Goel, clearly recorded the situation in the Vidharbha region. Besides, the Maharashtra Government held the largest-ever door-to-door survey of its kind in the region in 2006. This study covered every farm household in Vidharbha’s six ‘crisis’ districts using 10,000 investigators. It captured a portrait of distress and crisis (The Hindu, Nov. 22, 2006).
It found that of the 17 lakh plus families covered, more than a fourth — that is, more than two million people — were “under maximum distress.” And more than three quarters of the rest were “under medium distress.” In short, almost seven million people were in distress. The major sources of such misery: debt and crop loss or crop failure (which often overlap). The pressure on farmers who cannot afford their daughters’ marriages. And rising health costs.
The paper by Dr. Goel, “Farmers’ Suicides in Maharashtra: An Overview,” placed some of this data on record. While his reading of some of the data does not hold up, his contribution to the study of the subject has been quite vital.
Among other things, the paper reveals that the total number of suicides in the six districts between 2001 and 2006 was extremely high at 15,980. Worse, the number went up from 2,425 in 2005 to 2,832 in 2006 — an increase of 407 in a single year. (And in 2006 both the Prime Minister’s and Chief Minister’s “relief packages” were at work.) The paper also confirms indebtedness as a factor in 93 per cent of farm suicides. The next highest factor being “economic downfall” — at 74 per cent.
However, only the state gets to decide which suicide is a “farmers’ suicide.” The Maharashtra Government’s efforts show much creative accounting. The Nagpur Bench of the Mumbai High Court compelled the government to maintain suicide statistics on its official website from mid-2006. But with a few exceptions, the media never really picked up the damaging data on the website. And the government was free to play with definitions of what was a “genuine” farm suicide.Jugglery
As a result, less than 20 per cent of the 15,980 suicides are by “farmers.” This, in overwhelmingly rural districts! (For instance, 80 per cent of Yavatmal’s population is rural.) And just a fraction of that — 1,290 cases — are accepted by the government as distress suicides worthy of compensation. This is achieved by inspired jugglery, as the accompanying table (I) shows.
The first columns give you total suicides each year. Take 2005 for instance, which saw 2,425 suicides in these districts. The next column is “Farmers’ Suicides.” Just 468 of them. Then an extraordinary column: “Family members’ suicides.” That figure is 559. That is, it holds that family members on the farm committing suicide are not farmers. This helps skim down the figure further. Next comes the total of these two followed by “Investigated cases.” The final column invents a new category unknown elsewhere: “Eligible suicides”. That is, suicides the government deems genuine and due for compensation. And so, for 2005, the suicides column that begins at 2,425 ends with 273. This amputated figure then, for propaganda purposes, becomes the number of “farmers’ suicides.” This way, a ‘decline’ in farm suicides is ‘established.’
The contortions are best seen in the category of “Eligible” suicides. Indeed, there is a whole separate table — not reproduced here — on “Percentage of eligible farmers suicides in six districts.” And of course, “Estimated eligible suicide cases” show a decline. So the number of suicides keeps mounting — but the number of farm suicides keeps falling! If accepted at face value, this jugglery would imply that only farmers are doing well.
Everybody else is sinking in Vidharbha. Read more seriously, the region specific data — viewed against the national and State figures — suggest that Vidharbha is today the worst place in the nation to be a farmer.
Farm suicides worse after 2001[13/11/07]
P. Sainath
While the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture in distress.
Although National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data confirm an appalling 1.5 lakh farm suicides between 1997 and 2005, the figure is probably much higher. Worse, the farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) — number of suicides per 100,000 farmers — is also likely to be much higher than the disturbing 12.9 thrown up in the 2001 Census.
In the five years from 1997 to 2001, there were 78,737 farm suicides recorded in the country. On average, around 15,747 each year. But in just the next four years 2002-05, there were 70,507. Or a yearly average of 17,627 farm suicides. That is a rise of nearly 1,900 in the yearly averages of the two periods. Simply put, farm suicides have shot up after 2001 with the agrarian crisis biting deeper.
A comprehensive study of official data on farm suicides by K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) pins down these and other figures. The data analysed by Professor Nagaraj are drawn from the various issues of Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, a publication of the NCRB. But Professor Nagaraj also explains some of the reasons why the actual numbers and farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) could be far higher.
In 2001, when the farm suicides were not yet at their worst, the FSR at 12.9 was already higher than the General Suicide Rate (GSR) — suicides per 100,000 population — at 10.6. But even this higher suicide rate among farmers conceals a far worse reality. Firstly, the NCRB data seem to underestimate the number of farm suicides. This is because the criteria adopted for identifying a farm suicide at the State level are quite stringent. For instance, women and tenant farmers tend to get excluded from lists of farmers’ suicides. In those lists, only those with a title to land tend to be counted as farmers. On the other hand, the Census data are based on a very liberal definition of ‘cultivator.’Categories of cultivators
The 2001 Census gives data on two categories of cultivators: Cultivators among ‘main workers’ and those among ‘marginal workers.’ For the first group — cultivators among main workers — farming is the main activity. The second group includes those who practice cultivation only on a sporadic basis. However, both groups get counted as farmers. The net result of this is that while deriving the farm suicide rate from the NCRB and Census data, we are saddled with figures that undercount farm suicides but overcount the number of ‘farmers.’ Hence a value of 12.9 for the FSR is likely to be way below the mark. As Professor Nagaraj points out, “If we took only the cultivators among the main workers as farmers, the FSR increases dramatically to 15.8 which is nearly one and a half times the GSR of 10.6 in 2001.”
Secondly, the FSR is anchored in 2001 because that is the year of the Census. However, it was not one of the worst years in terms of farm suicides. Farm suicides in that year actually fell when compared to the previous year, 2000. But the very next year, in 2002, farmers’ suicides leapt by about 10 per cent. And the number of such deaths peaked in 2004. So while the number of farmers’ suicides shows a rising trend after 2001, the number of farmers may well have declined.
The trend of a decline in cultivators seems to have begun even earlier. The 1991 Census says there were 111 million cultivators among main workers. This fell to 103 million in the 2001 Census. This decline would surely have sharpened after 2001 as the farm crisis deepened. Certainly farming has no new takers.
As Professor Nagaraj’s study shows, the Annual Compound Growth rate (ACGR) for all suicides in India over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is 2.18 per cent. This is not very much higher than the population growth rate. For farm suicides, it is much higher, at nearly 3 (or 2.91) per cent. An ACGR of 3 per cent in farm suicides is more alarming as it applies to a smaller total of farmers each year. This means the farm suicide rate must have shot up after 2001.
Suicides by farmers went up 27 per cent during the 1997-2005 period. But non-farm suicides went up by 18 per cent. Indeed, the general suicide rate declined after 2001 — from 10.6 in 2001 to 10.3 in 2005. Which means the increase in general suicides has not kept pace with the increase in the general population. So by all accounts, while the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture in distress. Which would mean that farm suicides are mounting even as the farm population slowly declines.Huge differentials in numbers
Lastly, whether we take the farm suicide rate as 12.9 or 15.8, it is the figure for the country as a whole. That again hides huge differentials in the numbers and intensity of farm suicides across the country. There are States and regions in the country where the FSR is appallingly high. There are regions where it is mercifully still low.
Professor Nagaraj accordingly divided the States into four groups. Group I: States with very high general suicide rates. Group II: States with high general suicide rates and large numbers of farmers’ suicides. (This is the most important group.) Group 3: States with moderate general and farm suicide rates. And Group 4: States with low general and farm suicide rates (See Table).
What demarcates the Group II States — clearly the worst hit — is also the trend in suicides, which is most dismal there. This key group includes Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) and Goa. (The last with tiny absolute numbers.) The ratio of farmers’ suicide rate to the general suicide rate was highest in this Group (see Table). The overall ratio of this group is 1.7. Which means the farm suicide rate in these States is 70 per cent higher than it is in their whole population.
Of the major States, Maharashtra has the worst figure with a ratio of farmers’ suicide rate to general suicide rate of 2.0. That is, one hundred per cent higher. This is followed by Karnataka with 1.6. Of the smaller States, Kerala (from Group I) has the awful figure of 4.7. But it also shows a decline from 2004. Puducherry shows up as the worst with 15.4. Of course, the last two have smaller absolute numbers.
The trend for Group II is most dismal. The AGCR for farm suicides in these States for the 1997-2005 period was 5.33. Or nearly double the national figure of 2.9. And if this trend holds, farm suicides in this group as a whole would double every 13 years. Among these States, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh would fare even worse.
While the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture in distress.
Although National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data confirm an appalling 1.5 lakh farm suicides between 1997 and 2005, the figure is probably much higher. Worse, the farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) — number of suicides per 100,000 farmers — is also likely to be much higher than the disturbing 12.9 thrown up in the 2001 Census.
In the five years from 1997 to 2001, there were 78,737 farm suicides recorded in the country. On average, around 15,747 each year. But in just the next four years 2002-05, there were 70,507. Or a yearly average of 17,627 farm suicides. That is a rise of nearly 1,900 in the yearly averages of the two periods. Simply put, farm suicides have shot up after 2001 with the agrarian crisis biting deeper.
A comprehensive study of official data on farm suicides by K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) pins down these and other figures. The data analysed by Professor Nagaraj are drawn from the various issues of Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, a publication of the NCRB. But Professor Nagaraj also explains some of the reasons why the actual numbers and farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) could be far higher.
In 2001, when the farm suicides were not yet at their worst, the FSR at 12.9 was already higher than the General Suicide Rate (GSR) — suicides per 100,000 population — at 10.6. But even this higher suicide rate among farmers conceals a far worse reality. Firstly, the NCRB data seem to underestimate the number of farm suicides. This is because the criteria adopted for identifying a farm suicide at the State level are quite stringent. For instance, women and tenant farmers tend to get excluded from lists of farmers’ suicides. In those lists, only those with a title to land tend to be counted as farmers. On the other hand, the Census data are based on a very liberal definition of ‘cultivator.’Categories of cultivators
The 2001 Census gives data on two categories of cultivators: Cultivators among ‘main workers’ and those among ‘marginal workers.’ For the first group — cultivators among main workers — farming is the main activity. The second group includes those who practice cultivation only on a sporadic basis. However, both groups get counted as farmers. The net result of this is that while deriving the farm suicide rate from the NCRB and Census data, we are saddled with figures that undercount farm suicides but overcount the number of ‘farmers.’ Hence a value of 12.9 for the FSR is likely to be way below the mark. As Professor Nagaraj points out, “If we took only the cultivators among the main workers as farmers, the FSR increases dramatically to 15.8 which is nearly one and a half times the GSR of 10.6 in 2001.”
Secondly, the FSR is anchored in 2001 because that is the year of the Census. However, it was not one of the worst years in terms of farm suicides. Farm suicides in that year actually fell when compared to the previous year, 2000. But the very next year, in 2002, farmers’ suicides leapt by about 10 per cent. And the number of such deaths peaked in 2004. So while the number of farmers’ suicides shows a rising trend after 2001, the number of farmers may well have declined.
The trend of a decline in cultivators seems to have begun even earlier. The 1991 Census says there were 111 million cultivators among main workers. This fell to 103 million in the 2001 Census. This decline would surely have sharpened after 2001 as the farm crisis deepened. Certainly farming has no new takers.
As Professor Nagaraj’s study shows, the Annual Compound Growth rate (ACGR) for all suicides in India over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is 2.18 per cent. This is not very much higher than the population growth rate. For farm suicides, it is much higher, at nearly 3 (or 2.91) per cent. An ACGR of 3 per cent in farm suicides is more alarming as it applies to a smaller total of farmers each year. This means the farm suicide rate must have shot up after 2001.
Suicides by farmers went up 27 per cent during the 1997-2005 period. But non-farm suicides went up by 18 per cent. Indeed, the general suicide rate declined after 2001 — from 10.6 in 2001 to 10.3 in 2005. Which means the increase in general suicides has not kept pace with the increase in the general population. So by all accounts, while the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture in distress. Which would mean that farm suicides are mounting even as the farm population slowly declines.Huge differentials in numbers
Lastly, whether we take the farm suicide rate as 12.9 or 15.8, it is the figure for the country as a whole. That again hides huge differentials in the numbers and intensity of farm suicides across the country. There are States and regions in the country where the FSR is appallingly high. There are regions where it is mercifully still low.
Professor Nagaraj accordingly divided the States into four groups. Group I: States with very high general suicide rates. Group II: States with high general suicide rates and large numbers of farmers’ suicides. (This is the most important group.) Group 3: States with moderate general and farm suicide rates. And Group 4: States with low general and farm suicide rates (See Table).
What demarcates the Group II States — clearly the worst hit — is also the trend in suicides, which is most dismal there. This key group includes Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) and Goa. (The last with tiny absolute numbers.) The ratio of farmers’ suicide rate to the general suicide rate was highest in this Group (see Table). The overall ratio of this group is 1.7. Which means the farm suicide rate in these States is 70 per cent higher than it is in their whole population.
Of the major States, Maharashtra has the worst figure with a ratio of farmers’ suicide rate to general suicide rate of 2.0. That is, one hundred per cent higher. This is followed by Karnataka with 1.6. Of the smaller States, Kerala (from Group I) has the awful figure of 4.7. But it also shows a decline from 2004. Puducherry shows up as the worst with 15.4. Of course, the last two have smaller absolute numbers.
The trend for Group II is most dismal. The AGCR for farm suicides in these States for the 1997-2005 period was 5.33. Or nearly double the national figure of 2.9. And if this trend holds, farm suicides in this group as a whole would double every 13 years. Among these States, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh would fare even worse.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Farm suicides rising, most intense in 4 States
P. Sainath
In 2005, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) accounted for 43.9 per cent of all suicides and 64 per cent of all farm suicides in the country.
Of the 1.5 lakh Indian farmers who took their own lives between 1997 and 2005, nearly two-thirds did so in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). “What’s worse,” says K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), “the trend for this group of States looks quite dismal. All four have, over the nine-year period, shown an ascending trend in farmers’ suicides.̶ 1; This emerges from the painstaking study on farmers’ suicides in India between 1997 and 2005 that Professor Nagaraj has just concluded. The study draws on data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
“They began keeping farm data only from 1995,” says Professor Nagaraj. “But significant States did not start reporting their data till about two years later. So the study begins with the year 1997. And 2005 is the last year for which such data were available nationally.” He has also drawn on the 2001 Census in order to calculate the suicide rate for farmers (FSR). That is, suicides per 100,000 farmers.Dramatic increase
The number of Indians committing suicide each year rose from around 96,000 in 1997 to roughly 1.14 lakh in 2005. In the same period, the number of farmers taking their own lives each year shot up dramatically. From under 14,000 in 1997 to over 17,000 in 2005. While the rise in farm suicides has been on for over a decade, there have been sharp spurts in some years. For instance, 2004 saw well over 18,200 farm suicides across India. Almost two-thirds of these were in the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States.
The year 1998, too, saw a huge increase over the previous year. Farm suicides crossed the 16,000 mark, beating the preceding year by nearly 2,400 such deaths. Farm suicides as a proportion of total suicides rose from 14.2 in 1997 to 15.0 in 2005.
Professor Nagaraj also points to the Annual Compound Growth Rate (ACGR) “for suicides nationally, for suicides amongst farmers, and those committed using pesticides.”
The ACGR for all suicides in India over a nine-year period is 2.18 per cent. This is not very much higher than the population growth rate. But for farm suicides it is much higher, at nearly 3 (or 2.91) per cent. Powerfully, the ACGR for suicides committed by consuming pesticide was 2.5 per cent. Close to the figure for farmers.
Such suicides are often linked to the farm crisis, with pesticide being the handiest tool available to the farmer. “There are clear, disturbing patterns and trends in both farmers’ suicides and pesticide suicides,” says Professor Nagaraj.Not the full picture
Alarming though that is, it still does not capture the full picture. The data on suicides are complex, and sometimes misleading. And not just because of the flawed manner in which they are put together, or because of who puts them together. There are other problems, too. Farmers’ suicides as a percentage of total farmers is hard to calculate on a yearly basis. A clear national ‘farm suicide rate’ can be derived only for 2001. That is because we have the Census to tell us how many farmers there were in the country that year. For other years, that figure would be a conjecture, however plausible.
But even in 2001, when the farm suicides were not yet at their worst, the farm suicide rate (FSR) at 12.9 was much higher than the general suicide rate (GSR) at 10.6 for that year. But the GSR slowed down after that to 10.3 by 2005 even as the total number of suicides went up. It means that the increase in the number of general suicides did not keep pace with the growth in general population. But the FSR seems to have risen more steeply after 2001. By all accounts, while the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture.
In 2005, the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States accounted for 43.9 per cent of all suicides and 64.0 per cent of all farm suicides in the country. By contrast, a group of States with the highest general suicide rates — including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura, and Puducherry — accounted for 20.5 per cent of farm suicides in India. “Their share of both total suicides and of farmers’ suicides declined between 1997 and 2005 even as that of the Big Four steadily rose,” points out Professor Nagaraj.
To the extent the media have covered the farm crisis, their focus has been on farm suicides in four States — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. Very broadly speaking, that appears to have been right. All have very high rates of farmers’ suicides. Madhya Pradesh though, is a major State showing such trends which has received scant attention. (Among smaller regions and States, Goa, and Puducherry show extremely high farm suicide rates but on tiny absolute numbers.)
It is important that the figure of 1.5 lakh farm suicides is a bottom line estimate. It is by no means accurate or exhaustive. There are inherent and serious inaccuracies in the NCRB data as they are based on ground data that exclude large groups of people. As Professor Nagaraj puts it: “There is likely to be a serious underestimation of suicides, particularly of farmers’ suicides, in these reports. The most important problem is the way a farmer is defined at the ground level: as someone who has a title to land. This is likely, for instance, to leave out tenant farmers and, particularly, women farmers.”
The quality of reporting also varies from State to State. For instance, Haryana shows a very low ratio of farm suicides to general suicides. This conflicts with other assessments of the problem in that State. Data from Punjab have also been highly contested by groups monitoring the farm crisis there.
However, even in this flawed data, the trends are clear and alarming. But what has driven the huge increase in farm suicides, particularly in the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States? “Overall,” says Professor Nagaraj, “there exists since the mid-90s, an acute agrarian crisis. That’s across the country. In the Big Four and some other States, specific factors compound the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialised agriculture. Cash crops dominate. (And to a lesser extent, coarse cereals.) Water stress has been a common feature — and problems with land and water have worsened as state investment in agriculture disappears. Cultivation costs have shot up in these high input zones, with some inputs seeing cost hikes of several hundred per cent. The lack of regulation of these and other aspects of agriculture have sharpened those problems. Meanwhile, prices have crashed, as in the case of cotton, due to massive U.S.-EU subsidies to their growers. Or due to price rigging with the tightening grip of large corporations over the trade in agricultural commodities.”Debt trap
“From the mid-‘90s onwards,” points out Professor Nagaraj, “prices and farm incomes crashed. As costs rose — even as bank credit dried up — so did indebtedness. Even as subsidies for corporate farmers in the West rose, we cut our few, very minimal life supports and subsidies to our own farmers. The collapse of investment in agriculture also meant it was and is most difficult to get out of this trap.”
In 2005, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) accounted for 43.9 per cent of all suicides and 64 per cent of all farm suicides in the country.
Of the 1.5 lakh Indian farmers who took their own lives between 1997 and 2005, nearly two-thirds did so in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). “What’s worse,” says K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), “the trend for this group of States looks quite dismal. All four have, over the nine-year period, shown an ascending trend in farmers’ suicides.̶ 1; This emerges from the painstaking study on farmers’ suicides in India between 1997 and 2005 that Professor Nagaraj has just concluded. The study draws on data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
“They began keeping farm data only from 1995,” says Professor Nagaraj. “But significant States did not start reporting their data till about two years later. So the study begins with the year 1997. And 2005 is the last year for which such data were available nationally.” He has also drawn on the 2001 Census in order to calculate the suicide rate for farmers (FSR). That is, suicides per 100,000 farmers.Dramatic increase
The number of Indians committing suicide each year rose from around 96,000 in 1997 to roughly 1.14 lakh in 2005. In the same period, the number of farmers taking their own lives each year shot up dramatically. From under 14,000 in 1997 to over 17,000 in 2005. While the rise in farm suicides has been on for over a decade, there have been sharp spurts in some years. For instance, 2004 saw well over 18,200 farm suicides across India. Almost two-thirds of these were in the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States.
The year 1998, too, saw a huge increase over the previous year. Farm suicides crossed the 16,000 mark, beating the preceding year by nearly 2,400 such deaths. Farm suicides as a proportion of total suicides rose from 14.2 in 1997 to 15.0 in 2005.
Professor Nagaraj also points to the Annual Compound Growth Rate (ACGR) “for suicides nationally, for suicides amongst farmers, and those committed using pesticides.”
The ACGR for all suicides in India over a nine-year period is 2.18 per cent. This is not very much higher than the population growth rate. But for farm suicides it is much higher, at nearly 3 (or 2.91) per cent. Powerfully, the ACGR for suicides committed by consuming pesticide was 2.5 per cent. Close to the figure for farmers.
Such suicides are often linked to the farm crisis, with pesticide being the handiest tool available to the farmer. “There are clear, disturbing patterns and trends in both farmers’ suicides and pesticide suicides,” says Professor Nagaraj.Not the full picture
Alarming though that is, it still does not capture the full picture. The data on suicides are complex, and sometimes misleading. And not just because of the flawed manner in which they are put together, or because of who puts them together. There are other problems, too. Farmers’ suicides as a percentage of total farmers is hard to calculate on a yearly basis. A clear national ‘farm suicide rate’ can be derived only for 2001. That is because we have the Census to tell us how many farmers there were in the country that year. For other years, that figure would be a conjecture, however plausible.
But even in 2001, when the farm suicides were not yet at their worst, the farm suicide rate (FSR) at 12.9 was much higher than the general suicide rate (GSR) at 10.6 for that year. But the GSR slowed down after that to 10.3 by 2005 even as the total number of suicides went up. It means that the increase in the number of general suicides did not keep pace with the growth in general population. But the FSR seems to have risen more steeply after 2001. By all accounts, while the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture.
In 2005, the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States accounted for 43.9 per cent of all suicides and 64.0 per cent of all farm suicides in the country. By contrast, a group of States with the highest general suicide rates — including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura, and Puducherry — accounted for 20.5 per cent of farm suicides in India. “Their share of both total suicides and of farmers’ suicides declined between 1997 and 2005 even as that of the Big Four steadily rose,” points out Professor Nagaraj.
To the extent the media have covered the farm crisis, their focus has been on farm suicides in four States — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. Very broadly speaking, that appears to have been right. All have very high rates of farmers’ suicides. Madhya Pradesh though, is a major State showing such trends which has received scant attention. (Among smaller regions and States, Goa, and Puducherry show extremely high farm suicide rates but on tiny absolute numbers.)
It is important that the figure of 1.5 lakh farm suicides is a bottom line estimate. It is by no means accurate or exhaustive. There are inherent and serious inaccuracies in the NCRB data as they are based on ground data that exclude large groups of people. As Professor Nagaraj puts it: “There is likely to be a serious underestimation of suicides, particularly of farmers’ suicides, in these reports. The most important problem is the way a farmer is defined at the ground level: as someone who has a title to land. This is likely, for instance, to leave out tenant farmers and, particularly, women farmers.”
The quality of reporting also varies from State to State. For instance, Haryana shows a very low ratio of farm suicides to general suicides. This conflicts with other assessments of the problem in that State. Data from Punjab have also been highly contested by groups monitoring the farm crisis there.
However, even in this flawed data, the trends are clear and alarming. But what has driven the huge increase in farm suicides, particularly in the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States? “Overall,” says Professor Nagaraj, “there exists since the mid-90s, an acute agrarian crisis. That’s across the country. In the Big Four and some other States, specific factors compound the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialised agriculture. Cash crops dominate. (And to a lesser extent, coarse cereals.) Water stress has been a common feature — and problems with land and water have worsened as state investment in agriculture disappears. Cultivation costs have shot up in these high input zones, with some inputs seeing cost hikes of several hundred per cent. The lack of regulation of these and other aspects of agriculture have sharpened those problems. Meanwhile, prices have crashed, as in the case of cotton, due to massive U.S.-EU subsidies to their growers. Or due to price rigging with the tightening grip of large corporations over the trade in agricultural commodities.”Debt trap
“From the mid-‘90s onwards,” points out Professor Nagaraj, “prices and farm incomes crashed. As costs rose — even as bank credit dried up — so did indebtedness. Even as subsidies for corporate farmers in the West rose, we cut our few, very minimal life supports and subsidies to our own farmers. The collapse of investment in agriculture also meant it was and is most difficult to get out of this trap.”
Nearly 1.5 lakh farm suicides from 1997 to 2005[front page-hindu-12/11/2007]
P. Sainath
Nearly 1,50,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in nine years from 1997 to 2005, official data show. While the suicides occurred in many States, nearly two-thirds of such deaths were concentrated in five States where just a third of the country’s population lives. This means that farm suicides occurred in these (mainly cash crop) regions with appalling intensity.
The five States are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh (including Chattisgarh) and Kerala. Of these, only Kerala showed no sustained increase in the number of yearly farm suicides over this period. That was mainly because of a decline after 2003, which was that State’s worst year. Maharashtra, for which data exists from 1995, is by far the worst-hit. Farm suicides there more than trebled from 1083 in 1995 to 3926 in 2005.
Suicides as a whole rose nationally in the 1997-2005 period. But the rate of increase in farm suicides was far higher than the rate of increase in suicides by non-farmers. In Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the percentage increase in farm suicides were more than double the increase in non-farm suicides in this period.
While suicides by non-farmers went up by 23 per cent in the Big Four States, farm suicides went up by 52 per cent. Indeed, these States might be termed the “Suicide SEZ” or “Special Elimination Zone” for farmers this past decade. In 1997, these States accounted for 53 per cent, or just over half of all farm suicides in the country. By 2005, it was 64 per cent.
That is, in less than a decade, their share of farm suicides, already disproportionately high, leapt to nearly two-thirds.
These and other grim findings emerge from a comprehensive study of official data on farm suicides by Professor K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS).
The data analysed by him were drawn from various issues of Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India.
This is a publication of the National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. The period covered by the study is from 1997-2005.
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