Opinion - Editorials

The unending farm tragedy

The death by suicide of over 17,000 farmers in 2006, the latest year for which systematic official data are available, is a huge national tragedy. And the trends revealed by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) on farm suicides are appalling. While there have been ups and downs in the annual figures, there has been no let up in the trend since 2001. The figure for 1997, in itself disturbing, was under 14,000. From 2002, there has been no year in which fewer than 17,000 farmers’ suicides have been recorded. The 2006 figure confirms the trend. Worse, in the group of four or five States that account for close to two-thirds of all farmers’ suicides in India, the spike is relentless. Meanwhile, a slew of government announcements, programmes, and ‘relief packages’ make little impact. Such packages, totalling nearly Rs.5,000 crore, were unveiled in Maharashtra’s troubled Vidharbha region in 2006. Yet that very year, Maharashtra recorded the worst figure ever for any State.

Farm incomes remain dismal. The government has begun to speak of measures such as loan waivers, and low interest loans to tackle what is clearly the worst agrarian crisis India has faced in decades. At one level, this response is welcome as it seems to recognise that the suicides are a symptom of a much larger crisis that needs to be addressed deeply. At another level, the delayed response is baffling. Many of the measures now ‘contemplated’ were strongly recommended by the National Commission on Farmers headed by M.S.Swaminathan. As early as 2006, the NCF called for urgency in steps such as a price stabilisation fund. What prevented forward movement on any of these for two years? This is not a divisive issue, with most political parties and farm unions demanding the implementation of the NCF’s recommendations, which were much wider in scope than the measures the government now ‘contemplates.’ While a loan waiver will provide greatly needed relief, it is not in itself a solution. It has to go with a sea change in policy and approach towards agriculture. The piecemeal give-a-man-a-cow approach has proved pathetically inadequate. We need, among other things, far greater public investment in agriculture and farm technology; a risk stabilisation fund; low interest (in dryland regions, interest-free) loans for subsistence farmers; a five-year credit cycle that allows farmers breathing space where now they beg for it each season; the revival of food crop and a steady move towards low-cost farming operations; and a public domain approach to water. Indeed, a radical change of mindset. We cannot have packages that work in one direction while larger policies push in another.

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