Farmers Agitation

References refered to in video -https://scroll.in/article/1003219/nearly-400000-farmers-committed-suicide-in-india-between-1995-and-2018-why   Statistics say nearly 4,00,000 farmers committed suicide in India between 1995 and 2018. Why? An excerpt from ‘Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis’, by Jaideep Hardikar. Jaideep Hardikar
Aug 20, 2021 Kalamb was a sensitive man. A Dhangar (shepherd) by caste, a nomadic tribe in Maharashtra, his poems are rooted in the region’s rustic culture and offer invaluable insights into an average Indian farmer’s life. In .. poem titled “Lek” (Daughter), he showcases the worries of a father who is a farmer. While the poem carries deep patriarchal undertones, it explains the structural social problems of Vidarbha, which once was a feudal region; though things have changed or are changing, caste and class animosities still subtly prevail. In “Itihaas” (History) he questions time for preserving only the glorious history of the rich, while wilfully burying the resilient struggles of the poor.
Local farmers’ markets were invaded by global markets, like that of cotton or food. Rapid upward economic mobility of sections of the population was creating newer inequalities, leading to a perception among the peasantry that they were losing out. The fast-changing economic conditions were also altering long-held social equations.
Landed farmers, once among the respected classes in a village economy, were now unable to meet their ever-growing needs, while the non-landed classes, absorbed in the unorganised service economy, migrated out of their villages to urban centres for better wages and work, doing marginally better than they once did as farm labourers.
The prevailing agrarian distress has a context with many factors: a giant interlinked global economy; commercialisation of farming and life itself; a rural population unable to withstand the new economic order in the absence of safety nets; an upwardly mobile and new affluent India disconnected from its villages; and the struggling poor even in the urban spaces.