Is Farming A Curse For Indian Farmers?

Potential Ways to Find Solutions

India is predominantly an agrarian economy but our farmers have to deal with extremely distressing conditions of poverty, extreme mental pressure, and the subsequent suicides. Poor return on cultivation and absence of non-farming opportunities are indicators of the greater socio-economic illness in rural India. Moreover, the increasing cases of farmers’ suicides are symptomatic of a larger crisis, which is evident in the Indian society today. In this article, Dr Arvind Bijalwan and Dr Manmohan J R Dobriyal have discussed the ordeal that Indian farmers have to go through, the things that plague the agriculture sector in India today, and the possible ways to find solutions to this national problem.

It is important to recall the sad incident that took place in April 2015, when farmer Gajendra Singh, 41, from Dausa, Rajasthan, distressed with damage to his crops, committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. It was not just an isolated case of Gajendra Singh, as more than 1,000 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab during March–April 2017, due to crop failure by erratic and untimely rain. Understandably, when the farmers of the country are in big turmoil, how can we dream of a prosperous and crisisfree India? At the beginning of 2016, as many as 89 farmers ended their lives in Marathwada due to agrarian reasons. The grim story of farmers’ suicide is not new to Marathwada where around 1,100 farmers had also committed suicide in 2015. The pace of farmers’ suicide continued unabated in 2017 leading to agrarian crisis in India. Various reasons have been offered to explain why farmers commit suicide in India, including: floods, droughts, debt, use of genetically modified seeds, public health, use of lower quantity pesticides due to less investments producing a decreased yield, etc. There is no consensus on what the main causes might be but studies show suicide victims are motivated by more than one cause, on average three or more causes for committing suicide.

Indian Farmers Caught in a Difficult Situation