Opinion - Letters to the Editor

Farmers’ suicides

This refers to the report that 17,060 farm suicides took place in 2006 (Jan. 31). The number is five times more than the number of lives lost in the 9/11 attacks. It is not wrong to assume that many precious lives would have been saved had the farmers received timely assistance. Come to think of it, our government is turning a blind eye to five 9/11 attacks in India. But it is overenthusiastic in providing all the necessary incentives/packages to the corporates. The latest being the successive packages announced to tide over the rupee appreciation.

In their over eagerness to project a shining India at the domestic and, more importantly, international level, our leaders just do not seem to care about farmers. Who wants to be a spoilsport in a grand party? Aren’t there too many aam aadmis around? It is all right if some of them are dispensed with.

Biju Mathew,

New Delhi

Farmers’ suicides are a result of indebtedness, an outcome of an agricultural policy that favours corporate welfare and ignores agriculture. The farmers are trapped partly by their ignorance and partly by that of the rulers on how markets, especially multinationals, control the means of livelihood. The farmer is not the only victim; in future, it will be you and me.

V. Siva Anantha Krishnan,

Nanguneri

The suicide figures for 2006 are alarming, and there is the nagging thought that another year has passed. There is hope that delayed welfare and support schemes by a half-hearted government would have finally reached the farming households, and there is the fervent prayer that our farming brethren would have somehow found the courage to pull on. Public memory may be short. But even public conscience, it seems, died when the first farmer committed suicide a decade ago.

R. Swarnalatha,

Coimbatore

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