Small Farmers' Suicide in Odisha (original) (raw)
Political Economy of Farmers' Suicide A Case of Western Odisha
Farmer's suicide was never heard of in the tribal dominated Western Odisha. It takes a different turn when the victim is neither a non-paddy growing farmer nor immersed in big amount of loan. The cause of suicide though may seem same to the outside world, but the case to case analysis shows a distinct pattern of agrarian distress let loose during the neo-liberal reform era. The resource grab that has set in during the new economic reforms, has given a severe blow to the process of grassroots governance. The land dependent village citizens remained at the receiving end of regional disparity, language chauvinism and last but not the least the defunct social welfare programmes like MGNREGS, NSAP and PDS.
Farmers' Suicide: Trends and Trials
Farmer suicides continue to rise over the years reflecting a serious agrarian threat in the country. In the colonial and post colonial period, it manifested itself in the form of peasant unrests and riots occurring in some selected pockets of the country. However, with the onset of structural reforms, agriculture became vulnerable to a number of lop sided market policies that favoured more of the corporate and industrial houses than agriculture. The poor peasants were thrown open to a number of vagaries that they could not overcome. Agriculture became more and more capital intensive and input driven in character. With the negligible support from the government and the market, the poor peasants committed suicides that were reported in a majority of the states across the country. The current article makes an analysis of the post globalization phenomenon affecting agriculture and tries to study the trend of suicide in the country over the years. It makes a case analysis of the state of Odisha where farmer suicides have become an alarming issue for the regional government. The researchers have also made an attempt to discuss the efforts and initiatives taken by the central government, state governments and civil society organizations to bring down the rate of farmer suicide and the safety nets devised for the poor farmers who are prone to the epidemic through various social security schemes and programmes.
This paper will inquire the failure of government policies and schemes in tackling the issues of farmers and also provide with the some factors contributing to such issues.
A STUDY ON CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF FARMERS SUICIDES IN INDIA.pdf
Research Journal of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, 2016
ABSTRACT This paper study on the causes and consequences of farmer’s suicide, where in the recent past massive suicides were going on in India mostly in Maharashtra and Telangana State. Since Independence in India the contribution of agriculture share to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been declining, which itself shows that the government and administration had collectively deliberately neglected the agriculture sector. Every Indian feels proud to say that we live in a very large agricultural society where more than 65% of the families depend on this sector. But it is extremely brutal and negligence of government because there was no structured administration and very less in number of human resource in agriculture & its allied sectors to assist, sustain and encourage farmers to overcome the difficulties they face in farming. Services like soil test, proper guidance, crop information, productive seeds, new agriculture techniques, and awareness on mixed crop cultivation were not provided minimally to the farmers. The study analyzed and understood that most of the suicide farmers in India are the farmers who practiced only one crop cultivation and are not aware of mixed crop farming. Also, due to less concentration on courses of agriculture and its allied sectors which is resulting insufficient human resource personal and poor utilization of mechanizations in agriculture sector. Giving more priority to agricultural courses like diploma in agriculture, farm mechanization and others will help the farmers in future in resolving these issues. Key words: administration, agriculture officers, services, agriculture courses.
Farmers Suicide in India -Causes and Remedies
Nowadays the problem of farmers' suicides is one of the vital concerns that need to be addressed by the Government. Considering the paramount importance of this issue, the NCRB, for the first time, has collected detailed data on farmers' suicides. Farmers include those who own and work on field (viz. cultivators) as well as those who employ or hire workers for field work/farming activities. Days after attributing the record number of farmer suicides in 2015 to poor disbursement of credit, which left them at the mercy of usurious money lenders, the Centre on Tuesday shared with Parliament grim statistics highlighting how the situation remains unchanged in 2016, months. This paper focused on the causes and remedial measures to curb the problem of farmers' suicide in India. There is a wide array of factors that has led to the increasing spate of farmer suicides in India. The lands are not as productive as before, the markets are failing, the debts are piling up, and the pests cannot be kept at bay. More than an economic problem, this has now assumed political and humanitarian dimensions, especially since the past decade.
Agrarian Crisis and Farmer's Suicides in India
2009
The larger agrarian crisis has two dimensions. On the one hand, there is a livelihood crisis that threatens the very basis of survival for the vast majority of small and marginal farmers as also for agricultural labourers. On the other hand, there is an agricultural developmental crisis that lies in the neglect of agriculture arising out of poor design of programmes and allocation of resources and having resulted in declining productivity and profitability (Government of India 2007, Reddy and Mishra 2009).
An analysis of farmer suicides in India
Agriculture is the backbone of human civilization and as such no one can underestimate its importance. India is an agrarian country with around 60% of its populace depending directly or indirectly upon agriculture. But today Indian agriculture is going through a harsh period. The farmers find it very complicated to m ake their both ends meet. The suffering of farmers is due to several factors like the changing nature of agriculture, economies of production, policies of the government and the ongoing reforms.With the liberalization and importation of genetically modified seeds, the seeds-which were resistant to diseases and other problems used by farmers earlier were replaced the seeds which high yielding but very fragile, disease prone and fertilizer dependent. To employ these seeds farmers were forced to take loans. When crops failed they find it very difficult to pay back the loans they have incurred to grow crops and carry on, result was ending one's life-the suicide. This deep rooted agrarian crisis is deep-rooted in the path of capitalist development pursued by the Indian state. This paper tries to highlight the role of capitalism in farmer suicides using the secondary sources of data.
Farmers Suicide in Telangana State : An Overview
isara solutions, 2019
The Indian peasantry is the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world. India is the largest agricultural country in the world. This sector provides our food requirements as well as raw material to our industries. Agriculture is the backbone of Indian economy. It provides employment opportunities in agricultural sector, industrial sector and service sector. Today, it faces the crises of extinction. The issue of farmers’ suicide in rural India became a subject of major policy concern and is much debated both at the central as well as state government levels. The majority of the farmers’ suicides are concerned with indebtedness and poverty. Many farmers’ in the state took this extreme step of committing suicide. This phenomenon of farmers’ suicides has been termed as the agrarian distress. All the Indian states realised that indebtedness is a major problem in the rural economy, as Indian Government should make adequate formal credit facilities here. Most of the state farmers are facing inadequate expansion of credit facilities and poor access to these facilities has made the farmers, especially small and marginal ones, to resort the informal credit agencies. As NSSO survey revealed that about 68.6 percent of the total loan taken by the farmers is from informal credit market. The second major reason for committing suicide is drought and crop failure. For instance, there are sufficient rains during kharif season, while there is no rain in the rabi season. Besides this in some of the years, there has been scarcity of rains in both the seasons and no rains during the whole season due to these reason agricultural crops fail and increase indebtedness. Finally, the farmers are commit suicides in India.