Distress in the farms

THE interests of farmers are considered to be at the core of the election campaign in Chhattisgarh. The principal contenders, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, have announced special schemes for farmers. Both parties have promised free electricity for farming and good prices for rice, the main crop.

The Congress has promised a bonus of Rs.251 on every quintal of paddy procured by the government, while the BJP has promised Rs.270 a quintal. The Congress has said a government headed by it will not allow farm land to be acquired without farmers consent and pledged to fix a cap on the sale of agricultural land to outsiders. The BJP has promised interest free loans to farmers.

Neither party, however, has anything to say about the suicides by farmers in the State. The BJP leadership, of course, denies that there is any such thing in Chhattisgarh. Congress leaders say that farmers in Chhattisgarh have been committing suicide in large numbers in recent years, but they have not thought it fit to reach out to the bereaved families or to make it an election issue. Chief Minister Raman Singh pointed this out to bolster his argument of denial: You have so many parties in the opposition... Do you think that they would have remained silent if there was an actual issue like this?

But the data with the National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) and the State Police Departments record tell a different story. According to the NCRB report of 2006, 1,483 farmers committed suicide in the State in that year. That is, four cases of suicide a day.

The NCRB put the number of farmer suicide cases in Chhattisgarh as the fourth highest in the country, behind only Maharashtra (4,453) Andhra Pradesh (2,607) and Karnataka (1,720). Even in terms of the Farmer Suicide Rate (FSR), which is calculated in terms of the number of suicide cases for every one lakh farmers, Chhattisgarhs figures are high. The FSR put Kerala in the top spot with 142.9 cases for every one lakh farmers. Karnataka was second with 36.4 and Chhattisgarh was third with 33.7.

The government has no use for these figures. Nearly 80 per cent of Chhattisgarhs population belongs to the agricultural community and many farmers among this large population may have committed suicide owing to personal reasons, but they have not done so on account of debt or other economic constraints, Raman Singh told Frontline.

However, a tabulation of the Chhattisgarh Police on farmer suicides between January 2004 and June 2008 (a copy of which is in the possession of Frontline) for the district of Raipur shows that in this period as many as 63 farmers committed suicide because of poverty and debt. The most striking entry relates to farmers who committed suicide after losing mental balance: as many as 526 such deaths took place in the past five years. There were also 567 cases of suicide by farmers who could not cope with distressing illnesses. The Chief Minister refused to comment when his attention was drawn to what these entries indicated.

Frontline visited two bereaved families in Mahasamund district. The heads of both families, Ganesh Sahu of Kurubhatta village and Santosh Nishad of Gorali village, committed suicide several months ago. In both cases, police records attributed the suicide to distress on account of poverty and debt. Both the families said they had not received any compensation from the government.

Purushottam Sahu, father of 36-year-old Ganesh, said that officers from the block development office or the Agriculture Department had not cared to visit them. He said his son had a debt of approximately Rs.1,50,000 and it was becoming increasingly clear that he would not be able to pay it back. Over the years, input costs of farming have risen by leaps and bounds, and the returns are getting smaller. There is no intervention from the government to provide assistance in the form of loans, fertilizers or labour. The situation does indeed upset mental balance. Almost all the farmers who are listed as having committed suicide owing to mental imbalance must have suffered from financial constraints, Purushottam said. The family has given up farming and leased out the land in return for 35 boras (sacks) of paddy a year. One sack of paddy fetches about Rs.700.

Daulal Chandrakar of the district unit of the Kisan Congress had tried to draw attention to the plight of farmers in the district. According to him, the district has the highest FSR in Chhattisgarh at 83 cases of suicide in a year for every one lakh farmers. He told Frontline that he had sent all the details to the State Congress headquarters, but nothing happened.

Arvind Netam, a senior Congress leader from a tribal community, admitted that the State leadership had received all the details from time to time but said that the party was not able to take up the issue because of difficulties in coordination. Netams reference to coordination difficulties might be a reflection of the factionalism that plagues the Congress. With the principal opposition party riven by internal dissensions and the ruling party in denial mode, there does not seem to be much hope of immediate relief for the farmers.

Venkitesh Ramakrishnan