'Farmer Suicides and Agrarian Distress\r'

'FC PROJECT- SEM II FARMERS’ SUICIDES AND AGRARIAN DISTRESS 1988: â€Å"The peasants set about started to flex the political muscles that their scotch amelioration has given them … They fool acquired the capacity to rear the kind of sustained struggle they hurt. It is spillage to be difficult to [… ] contain them… be hold they involve the vote banks in the countryside to which each political party seeks access… A new subtlety of peasant power is likely to patronize India in coming years. ” Editorial in Times of India, Feb 3 1988, fol ruggeding acquireer agitations for higher expenses and subsidies in Western Uttar Pradesh 005: â€Å" tillage [in India today] is an economic residue that generously accommodates non-achievers resigned to a life of sad satisfaction. The villager is as livid as the homespun economy is lifeless(prenominal). From generous to suffering, the trend is to leave the village… ” Dipankar Gupta, The Vanishing hamlet 2007: â€Å"Rates of increase of market-gardening in the last decade bedevil been poor and are a major cause of rural distress. Farming is increasingly comme il faut an unviable activity. ” Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India Introduction India is chiefly an hoidenish country.\r\nMore than 60% of its existence directly or indirectly depends on kitchen-gardening. Agriculture accounts for approximately 33% of India’s GDP. Agriculture in India is often imputed to ‘ childs play with monsoon’. husbandmans are heavily dependent on the monsoons for their harvest. If the monsoons fail, they leave the farmer under a heap of debt with no harvest, their and pedigree of income. Unable to bear the heavy bear down of debt, they see suicide as the de2003-2008. consort to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), in that respect take been nearly 2 hundred thousand farmer suicides since 1997.\r\nHowever, indebtedness is not the restore(prenominal) reason for suicides. The suicides are a formulation of the ripening agrarian distress in India. It is clear from the current crisis, that the agrarian intimacy is marginalized in the national insurance docket today. Agrarian Crisis Falling productivity: everywhere the years the economy of India had underg nonpareil a geomorphologic transformation due to which the lot of husbandry has been declining. However the blendforce employed in agriculture hasn’t decreased. Accordingly, in 2004-05, the share of agriculture in GDP was 20. %, and to that extent the workforce employed in agriculture was still 56. 5%. This structural discrepancy means that there is a macro difference in the productivity of workers in agriculture and in non-agriculture occupations, productivity of workers in agriculture being one fifth part of those in non-agriculture. Marginalization of peasantry: This high substance of labour force has, in addition, been move on a s number 1ly catching cultivable land eye socket. Between 1960 and 2003, the material body of holdings doubled from 51 jillion to one hundred one million, while the area operated free falld from 133 million hectares to 108 million hectares.\r\nThis has led to a sharp decline in the average size of the holding, comporting to increasing number of diminished and marginal farmers. Hence, the coincidence of marginal landholders has increased from 39. 1% in 1960-61 to 71% in 2003, and among them they only operate 22. 6% of the land. This continuing skew pattern of land ownership reflects the lose of serious land reforms. Increasing marginalization forces the farmers into sharecropping and renting additional land. This leads to difficulties like danger of lease, increasing costs and curt returns from production, and difficulties in accessing belief.\r\nDeclining festering rank: Growth rates of agriculture have been on the decline. The growth rate by GDP from agriculture drop from 3 . 08% during 1980-81 to 1990-91, to 2. 57% during 1992-93 to 2005-06. This included a dip to 1. 3% in 1999-2000 and flat a negative growth of -2% in 2000-2001. Declining lucrativeness of agriculture: The ratio of bring prices acquire by the untaught domain to the total prices paid by it to non- boorish sectors is one of the important economic indicators to test whether rustic sector as a building block has either gained or lost in the process of economic growth.\r\nAlthough the reforms in the 90s with policies such(prenominal) as devaluation of currency were expected to return agriculture and improve its relative basis of hatful (ToT), this has not tangiblely been sustained. The work and income ToT became favourable to agriculture from 1984-85 until 1996-97, however thereafter they more or less stagnated Likewise, the insert-Output harm Parity (computed by analyse the powerfulness of prices paid for agricultural gossips with the index of prices received for the ou tputs, has since 1994-95 remained lower than one hundred, indicating declining profitability of agriculture ( disposal Of India, 2008).\r\nErosion of real incomes of farmers: When the prices received by the farmers for their crops are compared with the prices they pay for consumer goods (i. e. , Consumer Price Index for pastoral Labour †CPIAL), it is observe that farmers are facing an erosion of real incomes because the growth in aggregate price index for consumer goods has been higher than the growth in price index for agricultural commodities (Govt. of AP 2007).\r\nThis has resulted in declining relative living standards of farmers, particularly for small and marginal farmers whose incomes are clearly inadequate to meet consumption expenditure. Slowdown of exports: Exports shape out after 1997 following the eastbound Asian Crisis and the consequent large retardent in growth of international trade in agriculture. Simultaneously, international prices started falling for a lmost commodities, making Indian exports uncompetitive. Cheap imports have been on the rise with the removal of numerical restrictions on agriculture by 2000. changing cropping patterns:\r\nWith the opening-up of the economy, expectations of export opportunities and higher world prices for agricultural commodities led umpteen farmers to move into notes crops, a carriage from traditional subsistence crops. Devaluation of the rupee make Indian exports cheaper and hence attractive on the world market, and further encouraged gloss of cash in crops. On aggregate, the total area of the country’s farmland growing traditional grains declined by 18% in the decade after 1990-91, whereas areas growing non-food crops of cotton and sugarcane increased by 25% and 10% respectively.\r\nDeclining irrigation: Ironically, with a shift in cropping patterns towards more wet intensive cash crops, the aggregate net irrigated area remained stagnant (GoI 2007). give in governments have gross ly neglect investment in sur boldness irrigation infrastructure. hence there has been an increase in backstage investment in exploiting g exposit-water sources (mainly bore wells), which have been growing relative to canal and tankful irrigation. This has led to overexploitation of ground water and a falling water table, forcing farmers to heighten their wells every few years, which is expensive.\r\n go away institutions: The gradual weakening of state-support has also lead to dormancy of several state-run corporations, which used to leave support to the small-scale farmer. In AP, among these were the AP State Agro emergence Corporation (APSADC) which manufactured and distributed agricultural machinery, tools and inputs at subsidized rates, and AP State Seeds Development Corporation (APSSDC) which produced its own seed, sold it. Agricultural Extension Service was also downsized. reliance squeeze\r\nThe farmers perhaps most crisply feel the withdrawal of the state in the dec line in institutional quote support. With agriculture becoming increasingly moneymaking(prenominal)ized and costs of cultivation rising, most farmers facial expression for external sources of recognize. Institutional credit comes in the form of loans from commercial, co-operative, and regional rural banks. The communization of main banks in 1969 required them to grade bestow to agriculture, with tight come to-rate controls. But this came to an disconnected end with the Narasimham Committee on Banking Reforms post-1991.\r\nthrough and through various redefinitions of what constituted priority lending, the charge slowly squeezed credit lines to farmers. In AP the proportion of bank lending to agriculture fell from 43% in 1998 to 26. 7% in 2003, covering only one-third of the credit needs of the farmers. Even mandates of special lending to SCs, STs and very small farmers were revoked to pursue commercial viability and aggressive loan recovery. Tenant cultivators with insuffi cient titles are altogether denied access to glob credit.\r\nWith this drying up of formal credit, the farmers are left field with no choice than to depend on ‘informal’ sources for credit. An NSSO survey in 2004 revealed that 68. 6% of the total loans taken by farmers in AP are from the informal credit market. This credit typically comes at usurious by-line rates (anything betwixt 36% and cytosine% compound), and worse, from the same entrepreneur who is selling the farmer the seeds and fertilizers. This stranglehold of the trader-moneylender has become the root of practically exploitation and misery.\r\nCredit from these agents is almost neer in cash form. It is inputs (his own crisscross of seeds, fertilizers) issued against the future output whose price, invariably low and consumptive, is fixed by the agent himself. Farmer suicides Causes and Statistics The drying up of institutional credit and exploitative informal credit traps in the face of rising costs an d declining profitability have led to pervasive indebtedness among farmers. The web site Assessment Survey of Farmers in the 59th round of NSS in 2003 revealed that nearly half the farmers in the country were indebted.\r\nThe incidence was higher in states with input-intensive agriculture like Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, and was highest at 82% in Andhra Pradesh (GoI 2007). The cotton tap is where the suicides are taking place on a very, very large scale. It is the suicide belt of India. The share of the Big 5 States or ‘suicide belt’ in 2008 †Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh †remained very high at 10,797, or 66. 6 per cent of the total farm suicides in the country.\r\nAccording to a reading by the government of Maharashtra, almost 6 in 10 of those who kill themselves had debts between $110 and $550. Indebtedness, along with the constellation of input and output risks elaborated abo ve has been put the farmer under sustained duress. A tragic manifestation of this has been the phenomenon of suicides among desperate farmers. Since 1995, farmer suicides have been reported regularly from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Kerala, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Delhi, Goa and Sikkim.\r\nA Durkheimian study of the suicides concludes that the marginalization of the rural sector in the national policy agenda which prioritizes rapid economic growth is leaving rural producers with a speck of socio-economic estrangement from the community, and that the suicides were an effect of individualization of this estrangement. by and by Suicide Farms are confiscated due to inability to pay back high interest loans. Corrupt moneylenders harass the families. Widows are burdened with the new responsibility as the sole breadwinner. Children sometimes lose both parents to suicide, forcing their breeding to a alt, especially if they have to work in order to provide for their needs. scotch packages are provided to the farmers. But due to decadency the help never reaches the family. Conclusion and Recommendations: all over the world the impact of an industrial approach to boosting crop yields has stripped many small farmers of their self-sufficiency and thrown them into despair. A few recommendations are as follows: ?Input costs should be reduced. ?Markets must be made available for agricultural produce. ?A good market price must be provided for agricultural products. For farmers, credit should be made available at low interest rates. ?The extension organisation should be revived to solve enigmas in the field. ? there should be a proper system to address the issue of water scarcity. ? capable water for irrigation should be provided. ?Conserve Agro Bio -Diversity in Gene and Seed banks. ?Increase cipher outlay for Agriculture in every Five Year plan of the Government of India. ?Agricultural land should not be given to SEZ. ?The use of Genetically special Seeds should be stopped and organic agricultural practices encouraged. Farmers Rights law to be implemented immediately. ?Investments should be made to restore soil health. 2007: â€Å"The problem cannot be solved through economic packages alone. What is needed is social and spiritual interventions so that the farmers realize that suicide is not the way out… they should understand that they need to draw self confidence. The future generation should have the mental strength to face lifes challenges. ” Amma REFERENCES http://agrariancrisis. in/ http://wikipedia. org/ http://www. councilforresponsiblegenetics. org/\r\n'