INDIA: Dance of death in the ‘largest democracy’ shames none! (Asian Human Rights Commission)
“Here is the statistic. No less than 14,004 farmers committed suicide in 2011 as per the data of the National Crime Records Bureau. That is more than 10.3 per cent of the total number of suicides in India through the year. Factoring the issues like huge underreporting of cases and the practice of never counting women as ‘farmers’, the actual number of incidents must be much more. [...]
“The corresponding figures for the year before were pegged at an even higher 15933. Unfortunately, there was not much to rejoice in the ‘decline’ as the Times of India, a leading English daily, pointed out. It has asserted that the ‘dip’ could as well be explained by the curious assertion of the Government of Chhattisgarh claiming that no farmers in the province committed suicide in 2011 as against 1412 of them who had taken the extreme step in 2010! [...]
“Unmistakably, it is not merely the worst of the times that Indian peasantry has undergone but in fact is, as P. Sainath puts it ‘the worst-ever recorded wave of suicides of this kind in human history.’ The numbers substantiate the claim. With more than 15,000 farmers committing suicide annually and the total number has marked a quarter million mark two years ago, the situation warrants a response at war footing. The government, on its part, has chosen to do not even as much as acknowledging the situation and paying lip service to it. [...]
“These suicides, murders in fact, are almost never sudden. They follow a pattern that begin with and remains entwined with the cropping cycle that dominates in their area. They have to take loans for buying seeds. For they do not have anything to ‘guarantee’ the payback, banks treat them as ‘unreliable’ and refuse to give them any loans. That brings them to the local, and illegal, moneylenders who charge exorbitant rates beginning with 10 per cent per month to 60 per cent per month! Sowing seeds, however, does not guarantee anything as they are then forced to wait for the monsoons. And if the monsoons fail even by a few weeks, it signals the end of the road for the farmer. Unable to pay back even the interest, forget the principal, the farmer gets inhumanely insulted and hounded by the moneylenders who more often than not are the strongmen of the area. The shame, the crippling sense of losing honour set in slowly and ends in the suicide.”
anti-caste posts on the agrarian crisis
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