It is a bit hard to believe. Government statistics always have the tendency to make you suspect their veracity. Not that government departments lie. Most often they tell you the truth. When they do not want to do that, they simply resort to delaying tactics in the hope that the issue will soon be forgotten.
But amidst all the gloom, there’s a very heartening number. It appears there is a significant fall in the number of farmers’ suicides in the state; just 14 in the first nine months of this financial year.
A heartening figure, because in 2008-09 there were 143 such deaths. If you go back further, it was 182 in 2007-08 and 320 in 2006-07. Even if a few more deaths are reported in the remaining three months of the financial year, the drop is pretty significant.
It is so nationally as well — 177 in 2009-10 up to December as against 3,166 in 2006-07. These are figures provided by the Union ministry of agriculture to the media and one hopes that it is not a severe case of under-reporting or gross misreporting. There is, however, a very grim side to this story. In the decade up to 2008, two lakh farmers committed suicide in the country; a figure shockingly high.
The obvious inference that the government draws for such a remarkable drop in the number of farmers’ suicide this year is that the various packages and welfare measures it drew up have worked. The numbers probably justify that conclusion, though there would be many who’d disagree.
Statistics apart, the fact remains that small and marginal farmers are in eternal economic distress for some reason or other — drought or floods or pests that destroy crops or lack of market support for the product at a critical juncture. Those who keep a tab on the farm sector on a regular basis from an NGO perspective or agricultural economists may have different theories for this state of affairs but small farmers and farm labour live on the edge.
Quite apart from uncertainties of decent returns even in a good year, a flood, like the one in northern Karnataka a few months ago, can be devastating both financially and psychologically.
There are those who think that a substantial part of the distress of farmers is self-inflicted. Even when there is a farm crisis of sorts for external reasons and even when any income from farming that particular season or year is doubtful, farmers, in order to maintain their social status, raise debts for extraneous needs such as the marriage of a daughter or a son. Like the rest of the population, they also face emergency expenditure such as critical illness.
Money for such expenses usually comes from private sources atunbelievably high costs. These are debt traps from which they can rarely extricate themselves. There are no quick-fix solutions to this problem for sure. It is when the situation reaches a point of no return that some simply decide to end life though that, in no way, is a solution because the family has to carry the burden under even more trying circumstances.
The package that the government offered distressed farmers across the country last year and some other schemes of states may have changed the dismal picture for the present. In the long run, however, such one-time interventions rarely help. It wouldn’t be surprising if, in a couple of years, you saw another spike in the number of farmers’ suicides because rural indebtedness can’t be eliminated for good merely by such interventions.
That is why there are many economists who believe that subsidies of any sort are an inducement for inefficiency. There is probably some truth in it, but whether it’s true or not is besides the point; you simply cannot sit back and watch some 2,00,000 citizens killing themselves over a decade, because they considered death to be the only escape route from poverty.
There are standard answers to all the problems that farmers face. Most often the solutions that are offered help big and rich farmers even if the policy was crafted with the small and marginal farmer in mind. Whether it is access to finance or access to inputs through the cooperative societies, small and marginal farmers are invariably at the end of the queue. Even subsidised power benefits the high and mighty among growers much more than poor farmers.
If there is a skew in the delivery system, it is rarely addressed because the political class has a vested interest in protecting the articulate and powerful — usually the better-off farmers — though they do so in the name of those who live in economic servitude of the land, their only asset and in which they have so much pride.
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