A 12-Year Saga of Farm Suicides in India

In 2006-08, Maharastra saw 12 493 farm suicides, 85 percent higher than the 6 745 suicides it recorded during 1997-1999, and the worst three year period for any State at any time despite huge government debt relief packages

P. Sainath

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Worsening trend since 2002

The loan waiver year of 2008 saw 16 196 farm suicides in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Compared to 2007, that's a fall of just 436. As economist Professor K. Nagaraj at Madras Institute of Development Studies in Tamil Nadu, who has worked in-depth on farm suicide data, says, “The numbers leave little room for comfort and none at all for self-congratulation.” There were no major changes in the trend that set in from the late 1990s and worsened after 2002. The dismal truth is that very high numbers of farm suicides still occur within a fast decreasing farm population .

Between the Census of 1991 and that of 2001, nearly eight million cultivators quit farming. A year from now, the 2011 Census will tell us how many more quit in this decade. It is not likely to be less. It could dwarf that 8 million figure as the exodus from farming probably intensified after 2001. The State farm suicide rates — number of farmers committing suicide per 100 000 farmers — are still pegged to the outdated 2001 figures.

Much worse than it appears

Looking at farm suicides as a share of total suicides in India is misleading. That way, it's “aha! The percentage is coming down.”

First, the total number of suicides (all groups) is increasing in a growing population. Farm suicides, however, are rising within a declining farm population. Second, an all-India picture further obscures the intensity. The devastation is concentrated in the Big Five (cotton growing) States (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh), accounting for two-thirds of all farm suicides during 2003-08.

Taking just the Big Five, their percentage of all farm suicides has gone up. Worse, even their percentage of total all-India suicides (all categories) has risen. Poor States like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have been doing very badly for some years now. In the period 1997-2002, farm suicides in the Big 5 States accounted for roughly one out of every 12 of all suicides in the country. In 2003-08, they accounted for nearly one out of every 10.

The NCRB now has farm suicide data for 12 years. Actually, farm data appear in its records from 1995 onwards, but some States failed to report for the first two years. Hence 1997, the first year when all States began reporting their farm suicide data, is a more reliable base year. The NCRB has also made access much easier by placing all past years of “Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India” reports on its website. The 12-year period allows us to compare farm suicide numbers for 1997-2002, with how they turned out in the next 6-year period of 2003-2008. All 12 years were pretty bad, but the latter six were decidedly worse (see Table 1).

Table 1. Farm suicides in the ‘big five' cotton states compared with the rest of India

Year Maharashtra Andhra Pradesh Karnataka Madhya Pradesh & Chhatisgarh * Farm suicides in Big 5 states yearly total Farm suicides All-India yearly total ALL suicides in India yearly total Big 5 as % of all farm suicides Big 5 as % of ALL suicides 1997 1917 1097 1832 2390 7236 13622 95829 53.1 7.6 1998 2409 1813 1883 2278 8383 16015 104713 52.3 8.0 1999 2423 1974 2379 2654 9430 16082 110587 58.6 8.5 2000 3022 1525 2630 2660 9837 16603 108593 59.2 9.1 2001 3536 1509 2505 2824 10374 16415 108506 63.2 9.6 2002 3695 1896 2340 2578 10509 17971 110417 58.5 9.5 TOTALS 1997-2002 17002 9814 13569 15384 55769 96708 638645 57.5 8.7 2003 3836 1800 2678 2511 10825 17164 110851 63.1 9.8 2004 4147 2666 1963 3033 11809 18241 113697 64.7 10.4 2005 3926 2490 1883 2660 10959 17131 113914 64.0 9.6 2006 4453 2607 1720 2858 11638 17060 118112 68.2 9.9 2007 4238 1797 2135 2856 11026 16632 122637 66.3 9.0 2008 3802 2105 1737 3152 10797 16196 125017 66.7 8.6 TOTALS 2003-2008 24402 13465 12116 17070 67054 102424 704228 65.5 9.6 TOTALS 1997-2008 41404 23279 25685 32454 122823 199132 1342873 61.5 9.1

* MP & Chhattisgarh now have separately recorded data for recent years (available on the NCRB website ). As the data for earlier years cannot be disaggregated we treat them as a single entity in this table, for convenience.

Source: Data for 1997-2005 derived by Prof. K. Nagaraj from NCRB reports (Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India) for those years (The Hindu , Nov. 12-15, 2007) and extended thereafter with NCRB ADSI data from years 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Maharastra the top suicide state despite huge government relief

Reading a ‘trend' into a single year's dip or rise is misleading. Better to look at 3-year or 6-year periods within 1997-2008. For instance, Maharashtra saw a decline in farm suicide numbers in 2005, but the very next year proved to be its worst ever. Since 2006, the State has been the focus of many initiatives. Manmohan Singh's visit to Vidharbha that year brought the “Prime Minister's Relief Package” of Rs3 750 crore for six crisis-ridden districts of the region. This came on top of Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh's Rs1 075 crore “CM's relief package.” Then followed the nearly Rs9 000 crore that was Maharashtra's share of the Rs70 000 crore (US$15.18 bn) Central loan waiver for farmers; to which the State government added Rs 6 200 crore for those farmers not covered by the waiver. The State added Rs.500 crore for a one-time settlement (OTS) for poor farmers who had been excluded from the waiver altogether because they owned over five acres of land. In all, the amounts committed to fighting the agrarian crisis in Maharashtra totalled Rs20 525 crore (about US$ 4.35 bn) from 2006 to 2008. (And that's not counting huge handouts to the sugar barons.) Yet, that proved to be the worst three-year period ever for any State at any time since the recording of farm data began.

In 2006-08, Maharashtra saw 12 493 farm suicides; nearly 600 more than the previous worst of 2002-2005 and 85 per cent higher than the 6 749 suicides recorded in the three-year period of 1997-1999 (see Table 2). The average suicides per year in the period 1997-2002 is 2834 compared to 4067 in the period 2003-2008, an increase of 43.5 percent. The same government was in power, incidentally, in the worst six years. Moreover, these higher numbers are coming from a shrinking farm population. By 2001, 42 per cent of Maharashtra's population was already urban. Its farmer base has certainly not grown.

Table 2. Farm suicides Maharashtra: four 3-year periods

1997-1999 1999-2002 2003-2005 2006-2008 1917 3022 3836 4453 2409 3536 4147 4238 2423 3695 3926 3802 6749 10253 11909 12493

So was the loan waiver useless? The idea of a waiver was not a bad thing. And it was right to intervene. It could also be argued that but for the relief the waiver brought to some farmers at least, the suicide numbers of 2008 could have been a lot worse. The waiver was a welcome step for farmers, but its architecture was flawed. A point strongly made in “ Oh! What a lovely waiver” ( The Hindu , March 10, 2008). It dealt only with bank credit and ignored moneylender debt. So only those farmers with access to institutional credit would benefit. Tenant farmers in Andhra Pradesh and poor farmers in Vidharbha and elsewhere get their loans mainly from moneylenders. So, in fact, farmers in Kerala, where everyone has a bank account, were more likely to gain. (Kerala was also the one State to address the issue of moneylender debt.)

The 2008 waiver also excluded those holding over five acres, making no distinction between irrigated and non-irrigated land. This devastated many struggling farmers with eight or 10 acres of poor, dry land. On the other hand, West Bengal's farmers, huge numbers of small holders below the 5-acre limit, stood to gain far more.

Commercialisation of agriculture and high debt to blame

Every suicide has a multiplicity of causes. But when you have nearly 200 000 among farmers, it makes sense to seek broad common factors within that group. As Dr. Nagaraj has repeatedly pointed out, the suicides appear concentrated in regions of high commercialisation of agriculture and very high peasant debt. Cash crop farmers seemed far more vulnerable to suicide than those growing food crops. Yet the basic underlying causes of the crisis remained untouched. The predatory commercialisation of the countryside; a massive decline in investment in agriculture; the withdrawal of bank credit at a time of soaring input prices; the crash in farm incomes combined with an explosion of cultivation costs; the shifting of millions from food crop to cash crop cultivation with all its risks; the corporate hijack of every major sector of agriculture including, and especially, seed; growing water stress and moves towards privatisation of that resource. The government was trying to beat the crisis with a one-off waiver; leaving in place all its causes.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought ; this article is based on a report that first appeared in The Hindu 25 January 2010

Article first published 09/02/10

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