Chopping The Hand That Feeds: The Tragic Truth Behind Farmer Suicides In India
Originally published at lmt-lss.com on January 27, 2016.
What’s even more shocking than the rising number of farmer suicides is the country’s blatant ignorance towards the problem.
It’s around 7:30 in the evening. You switch on your TV, sip your cup of tea, and lean back on your couch as you change one channel after another. When you stumble upon Dhoni’s interview on a news channel, you instantly raise the volume.
Your dad joins you and starts praising Dhoni’s distinct helicopter shots. Meanwhile, your mom comments on his new hairstyle. Disinterested in her views, you lean forward in keen interest to watch the match highlights.
Much to your disappointment, the channel unexpectedly switches focus to a devastating news:
Another Farmer Ends His Life in Maharashtra.
What do you do? You lean back again, take another sip of tea and change the channel.
Your dad leaves the couch.
This, in general, is India’s attitude towards farmers and their gruesome plight.
You’ve probably read, watched and talked about farmer suicides many times in your life. Probably, this is why every time you come across a shocking news of a farmer ending his life, you seem least bit worried or moved.
Sadly, farmer suicides have become a blind spot for most people.
Why are farmer suicide incidents not shocking anymore?
What picture comes to your mind when you imagine a farmer? Most probably, a lean, fragile person with pale skin and sunken eyes slogging away in a rough patch of land under the burning sun. Most of us know this much about him: he’s ill, poor, uneducated and struggles through out his day to make ends meet.
We don’t talk about this man in a party or even in a friendly gathering. We seem more interested in Rahul Gandhi’s latest twitter troll or about the new iPhone. But this man’s plight would never find its way into our everyday conversations. His dark and dismal life will never catch our attention. Why? Because he’s a just a farmer, toiling somewhere far away.
This brings us to another question. Are farmers in India destined to suffer? Going by the current state of affairs, YES.
The state of farmers in India has never been favourable. Their suicide rates have only kept increasing for a long time. In the last 20 years, around 3,00,000 farmers ended their lives. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 5650 farmer suicides occurred in 2014 alone.
Regardless of the alarming number, these startling stats don’t seem to startle us anymore, right?
This only highlights our cold-hearted mentality towards them. Even in this day and age, when access to transport, communication and information is mind-boggingly simple, a farmer’s hardship goes unspoken, unheard and unaddressed.
Every Farmer’s Plight
There’s every possibility that you know about farmers’ problems.
Many of you might have probably won debates in schools and colleges on subjects related to the misery of farmers. But trophies and accolades apart, how many of us actually know what an average farmer goes through in his life?
Let’s take the story of Popat Ghadwaje, for instance.
Ghadwaje — a farmer from Umbrale village in the western state of Maharashtra — committed suicide when he was 42. This is an age when most of us will have a secure job, a happy family and a two storey house to call “home”. But Ghadwaje wasn’t as fortunate as us. He was just a farmer.
“He was crushed under the sun” said his 16 year old son in an interview with Al Jazeera.
For Ghadwaje to feed himself and his family, harvest was his only hope. Being in India, where agriculture is still vulnerable to climatic fluctuations, Ghadwaje lost his crops to a destructive hailstorm. Seeing his crops wither and die in front of his eyes, the helpless farmer decided to end his life.
Farmers like Popat Ghadwaje are there in every part of the country. Unable to carry the weight of traumas, 42 farmers like him commit suicide every day in India. The surprising fact is that all of them share the same miseries: monsoon failures, high debt burdens, government neglect, health and family problems — and so on.
Ignorance vs Responsibility
As soon as a farmer takes his life and the incident becomes “news”, the goverment swings into action and immediately provides financial relief to the family of the deceased. The film Peepli Live was loosely based on this shortsighted move from the government. Instead of spending money on relief measures every time a farmer takes his life, why can’t the government spend money on taking preventive measures to avoid it?
The problem is that India has never paid much heed to the state of farmers. Because of this blatant ignorance, their miseries have never been addressed, resulting in the unending suicides of farmers around the country. The need clearly is to be responsible and focus on solutions.
Let’s take this one by one.
- Agriculture in India is still dependent on nature. We need better water management measures. In this day and age, setting up efficient water management systems will not be a problem.
- Taking loans is still a humongous task for every farmer. Expecting them to fill long forms and evaluate countless documents before taking a loan is a heartless approach. So, shouldn’t we simplify this process for them?
- Cultivation of crops can be made much, much more economical. Technology is key here. This means educating farmers about mobile phones, apps, weather conditions and timing of cultivation.
- For a majority of farmers, farming is the only source of income. That’s a big risk, evidently. So they must be trained to take up alternative jobs.
- They must have easy access to counselling and healthcare systems. Authorities must ensure that vulnerable farmers are counselled and tuned back to a life of possibilities.
Tomorrow again when we switch on our TVs, we might come across a story about a farmer’s death. But before we go and change the channel like we always do, we can pause and ask three simple questions to ourselves:
Is it fair on our part to neglect their plight?
Can we do something about it?
When will we do it?
