By 2024, we know that over 4,00,000 farmers have taken their own lives, largely in policy-driven distress. That figure is an official one – and a terrible underestimate. The Corporate Hijack of Agriculture Is India's Actual Agrarian Crisis - The Wire
The wilful destruction of the farmer and the agricultural labourer saw, between Censuses 2001 and 2011, the biggest ever migrations in India. As farming and the larger agrarian economy tanked, tens of millions of people left their villages for cities and small towns. This was not taken to be a bad thing.
The Kafkaesque transformation of agricultural universities from the community-centred institutions they once were to laboratories of corporate agribusiness. The systematic diversion of formal credit away from farmers, which forced tens of millions to turn to the old and new sahukars (moneylenders). A collapse of prices for the farmer, even as they exploded at the consumer level. A look at cultivation costs of cotton in Vidarbha between 2003 and 2013 showed that input prices and the overall cost of cultivation of an acre of cotton rose by 250-300 per cent and, in some cases, even more. But what about farmers’ incomes? Those moved, if at all, at a fraction of the crippling cultivation cost increases, particularly that of seeds.
And income? Even the 77th round of the National Sample Survey, or NSS, the last and latest on farm households, shows that the average monthly income of farm households is around Rs.10,218. Can you think of a single job in the organised sector that does not pay close to double that? And remember, that figure is household, not individual income. And remember, that in 2017, the Narendra Modi government promised to double farmers’ incomes in five years. Well, income from cultivation actually saw a decline of 10 per cent between 2012-13 and 2018-19. Farm households now get more income from wages, salaries, and livestock.
As progressive economists have noted, we saw a globalisation of prices and an Indianisation of incomes.
Note that the population of farmers in India has gone up in every census after Independence, including 1991. Then there is a stunning collapse. Census 2001 saw a fall in full-time or “main cultivator” farmers of 7.2 million, yes million. Census 2011 recorded a further fall in their numbers of 7.7 million.
In short, in the first 20 years after we embraced the “new” economic policies, India’s farmer population fell by almost 15 million. That is, on average, over 2,000 full-time (or “main cultivator”) farmers were quitting agriculture every 24 hours.
A total of 11,290 persons involved in farming committed suicide in 2022, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. This is equivalent to at least 30 farmer suicides every day or more than one every hour. The 2022 figure was higher than the 10,881 suicides recorded in 2021, 10,677 in 2020, and 10,281 in 2019.
In the three decades since 1991, the farm crisis has merged with the crisis in the larger agrarian society. Accompanied by an employment crisis, a migrations crisis, and a water, health, and education crisis. And more. And all the while, the suicides by farmers (including agricultural labourers) has continued. The government’s answer is to grossly fiddle with the methodology of the National Crime Records Bureau. The result is that the farm suicides data after 2014 are not comparable with that of the preceding 19 years for which data exist.
Fact: the suicides are not the agrarian crisis; they are its most tragic result. They are its outcome, not its origin. Its consequence, not its cause.
by P. Sainath
14/03/2025