Farmers' suicides

“We have no money, moneylenders are not ready to wait. What should we do? We can’t even afford to take onions to the market. You are just thinking about yourself, Modi saheb. You must provide the guaranteed price for the produce… The finance guys threaten, and the patpedhi (cooperative society) officers abuse. Who should we go for justice?… Today, I am forced to commit suicide because of your inaction.”

Those were the words of Dashrath Lakshman Kedari before he died by suicide last year in Pune district of Maharashtra. His is one among the 1,00,474 suicides in the farming sector in the Narendra Modi years (2014-2022), as per the recently released National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report. This amounts to nearly 30 suicides per day in these nine years. And yet we heard BJP MP Nishikant Dubey claiming that no farmer has died under Modi by suicide. “Did the opposition ever have a single discussion about farmers’ suicides in the last eight years?” he asked, “If they didn’t, it means farmers are not dying by suicide.”  https://thewire.in/agriculture/average-30-farmer-suicides-per-day-in-modi-govt-years-points-to-a-systemic-apathy 

Declining public investments, privatisation of key industries, opening up to external trade, decline in state subsidies and shrinking formal agricultural credit all contributed to the long winter for farmers in India who found it increasingly difficult to compete with the heavily subsidised imports. Add to this the monopolistic practices of agro-business giants like Monsanto, the expensive, out of reach genetically modified seeds, fertilisers and insecticides that raised inputs cost by leaps. 

by Anirban Bhattacharya, Pranay Raj and Nancy Pathak

18/12/2023