Suicide stories

Exaggerated claims about suicides by farmers in Punjab appear to be part of an agenda to attack state controls on the rural economy and to pave the way for outright control of agriculture by feudal landlords.

CHOTIAN, in Lehra block of southern Punjab's Sangrur district, is an untidy cluster of 600-odd mud-and-brick homes where some 3,000 people live. A decaying monument built a century ago adding to its slightly decrepit air, Chotian is typical of the villages that dot the region. Although the region is considered backward, the residents of Chotian village own 96 tractors that serve the lands of the Jat, Saini and other upper-caste Hindu families in the area.

Farm rents for a hectare of land range between Rs. 13,000 and Rs. 15,000, and the income from a plot of this size ranges between Rs.40,000 and Rs.42,000 a year. These figures conform to the State average. The Dalits in the village largely work in Jakhal, a town in Haryana, where wages for unskilled workers touch Rs.100 a day and those for skilled workers are twice the amount.

Poor is not a word anyone would use to describe the people of Chotian. But since late-February the village has been at the centre of a debate over rural poverty in Punjab, amidst claims that Chotian is a symbol of all that has gone wrong with the State's agricultural sector.

In letters written to the National Human Rights Commission and Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal, the convener of the Movement Against State Repression (MASR), Inderjeet Singh Jaijee, said that Chotian saw 23 cases of poverty-driven suicide between 1994 and 1997, and that the adjoining village of Bangan saw 13 such cases. Jaijee's letters stated that the pattern suggested a crisis similar to that of the cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh who were recently driven to suicide. Reports about the causes of the deaths opened a debate on whether the Green Revolution that once changed the face of Punjab was collapsing inwards.

According to Jaijee, farmers and farm labourers in Punjab were unable to make ends meet and there were thousands of suicide cases in the past decade. In his letter to the Chief Minister, he was explicitly political. According to Jaijee, the State Government has encouraged the cultivation of grain and the price of grain has been pegged at a level that enables the weaker sections in other States to buy it at subsidised cost. This practice of price control, he conjectured, amounted to colonial exploitation, for there was no justice in depriving one's own family to fatten another family.

In addition to relatively non-controversial measures such as the introduction of crop insurance, Jaijee's annexures to the letters recommend among other things the removal of the 14-acre land ceiling on the ground that this prevented efficient farmers from expanding their operations. However, what is ignored is the fact that the disintegration of the joint family system and the growth in the population should logically lead to the fragmentation of holdings into smaller parcels.

HOW accurate are Jaijee's claims? Investigations at Chotian showed that it was far from clear whether any case of suicide had actually taken place. Village sarpanch Leela Singh looked bemused when asked about media reports of cases of suicide in his village. "I have not seen what has been written," he said, "but no one here has killed himself." Asked for a possible explanation for the reports, he speculated that deaths caused by accidents might have been misrepresented as cases of suicide.

He said: "There was a case of electrocution a few months ago. Over the past eight years, 14 people have died as a result of inhaling pesticides while spraying crops." Pesticide-related deaths are common in Punjab, as few farmers use protective masks and gloves. Other deaths in the village, farmer Teja Singh told Frontline, were the result of alcoholism and addiction to poppy husk, a problem endemic to southern Punjab.

Official evidence of too many cases of suicide was equally thin. At Munak police station, within the limits of which Chotian, Bangan and adjoining areas come, 26 deaths were recorded during the period from 1994 to 1997 under Section 174 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) which deals with all forms of accidental death where no blame is attributable to other individuals. Only one was an evident case of suicide - a Home Guards jawan shot himself in 1996. In another case, a heavy dose of a drug led to the death of a farmer whose wife had left him for another man. Five other deaths were attributable to the overuse of drugs or to exposure to pesticides.

Station House Officer Sukhwinder Singh said that as a matter of practice, cases of suicide were not explicitly recorded unless there was suspicion that a member of the family or other people drove someone to death. He said: "If a family insists, for example, that the use of an overdose of a drug was accidental, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, we record the death under Section 174, to save the family social humiliation and legal harassment."

Most damning of all were the records of deaths maintained by village chowkidars Ajmer Singh and Rabbi Singh for the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Sangrur. The records, which detail the 80 deaths in Chotian between 1994 and 1997, contradict Jaijee's claims. When Frontline tallied the ages of the 23 persons who, according to Jaijee, committed suicide during the period, only 12 of these were even loosely reconcilable with the data in the village death register (see table). And many of the deaths were not cases of suicide prima facie. For instance, Hansa Singh, 22, who died on March 8, 1994, actually died along with his friend Krishan Ram when a tractor they were riding overturned. While Jaijee has listed Hansa Singh as a suicide victim, his record makes no mention of Krishan Ram.

Several similar cases of inaccuracy emerged in an analysis of the chowkidar's data. The ages of several young people who died in the village approximated the ages listed by Jaijee. For example, the 21-year-old victim listed by Jaijee could be 25-year-old Amrik Singh, son of Atma Ram, who died on August 29, 1996 or 20-year-old Sukhpal Singh, son of Govind Singh. Amrik Singh died in a traffic accident and Sukhpal Singh died after inhaling pesticide fumes during spraying operations. Their inclusion in the list of cases of suicide is inexplicable. The chowkidars admitted that they had not recorded two possible cases of suicide that had taken place in the village in order to protect the honour of their families and the community. Neither of the names they provided was on Jaijee's list. One of these two deaths occurred after the victims consumed a pesticide, and the other was that of a woman who jumped from the roof of a house in 1996.

Jaijee's record lists neither the specific causes of deaths nor the names of the claimed suicide victims. He said: "I kept the identities concealed to protect families from social stigma." The dates of the deaths tally broadly with the dates recorded in the register of births and deaths maintained by the village chowkidar. By Jaijee's own admission, the families in question do not attribute these deaths to suicide. He argued that this was natural given the social context, but the entire village knows what really happened.

The residents of Chotian themselves, however, believe otherwise. "Things have been bad over the past five years," said Roop Lal, a resident. He said that debts had increased, expenses had gone up, habits had changed, but incomes had not kept pace with the changes. Farmers with less than 10 acres (four hectares) of land find it increasingly difficult to keep going and their children cannot find government or industrial jobs, according to him. However, he denied that anyone in the village had committed suicide because of poverty.

If the data offered by Jaijee for Chotian and Bangan were assumed to be true, can they, as he has done, be construed as reflecting the situation in Punjab at large?

In 1992, Chennai-based psychiatrist Lakshmi Vijaykumar wrote in the journal Health Administrator that official data showed that Pondicherry recorded the country's highest rate of suicide, 56.30 per 100,000 population per annum. Expressed in similar terms, the cases of suicide that Jaijee claims to have occurred at Chotian and Bangan would have constituted a staggering rate of 149.94 per annum. If Punjab recorded, say, even half this rate, it would certainly figure in the list of States with high suicide rates. But Lakshmi Vijaykumar's article makes it clear that Punjab does not have such a rate. The article says that poverty is a relatively infrequent ground for suicide, ranking sixth behind incurable disease, troubles with in-laws, quarrels with spouses, love affairs and insanity. This data, too, appear irreconcilable with the picture outlined in Jaijee's report.

WHAT, then, is the real state of rural poverty in Punjab today? A recent survey by the economist H.S. Shergill and the Institute for Communication and Development found that the rapid modernisation of agriculture in the State had resulted in a considerably higher growth in cash expenditure on farm inputs in comparison with the growth of output. The compound rate of growth of cash expenditure on various crops between 1974-1975 and 1991-1992 ranged from 8.97 per cent to 11.17 per cent, while the growth of yields per acre of key crops such as rice and wheat was below 4 per cent.

Growth in per capita income, according to the Shergill-IDC study, has been absorbed mostly by the growth in per capita consumption expenditure and the rising living and consumption standards of the farming community. Very little surplus cash is left with farmers to finance the heavy cash expenditure on modern, market-supplied farm inputs. As a consequence, farmers have to borrow regularly and routinely huge amounts to finance cash expenditure on modern farm inputs.

The sheer scale of these borrowings leaves little room for complacency about the long-term security of agriculture in Punjab. The debt per operated acre of farmland, the Shergill-IDC findings suggest, stood at Rs.5,721, of which Rs.727.49 consisted of long-term non-productive credit. Small and semi-medium farmers bore the worst burden of agricultural debt. Debt per acre for farmers with small holdings stood at almost twice the State-wide figure, Rs.10,105. Semi-medium farmers' debt per operated acre was Rs.7,941, of which Rs.370.89 consisted of unproductive credit. Considerable sums were borrowed from arthiyas and other informal-sector moneylenders to meet social expenditures.

The highest proportion of surveyed farmers, 36.10 per cent, attributed their indebtedness to excessive expenditure on domestic consumption and social ceremonies, while 30.80 per cent attributed it to abnormally high prices of farm inputs, the study noted.

Medium and large farmers, by contrast, borrowed less per acre to finance their operations, and tended to have surpluses that did not necessitate borrowing for consumption. This finding of the Shergill-IDC report affirmed long-standing fears that small farmers face a slow process of extermination. Pressures on small farmers have been particularly intense in the recent past; one-third of the farmers surveyed by the IDC reported an actual decline in wheat and paddy output over the last three years. Over time, large farmers with considerable cash surpluses seem certain to spearhead a process of land consolidation in Punjab.

The entry of multinational corporations into Punjab's agriculture sector, notably the presence of Pepsi Foods, also suggests that in the long run, small and medium farmers will simply be unable to match the technological and financial muscle of the new entrants. Unless agriculture is able to forge forward linkages in industry that are capable of absorbing those who move from the farmland to the cities, considerable social dislocation could take place.

NONE of this, however, should give the impression that the countryside in Punjab is getting impoverished. In a 1997 paper for the IDC, Shergill and Gurmail Singh have shown that rural and urban poverty in Punjab has steadily declined, despite the large influx of immigrants from other States. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the poor and the ultra-poor in the State are recent immigrants. Rural indebtedness in the State is currently more a long-term threat rather than an immediate source of poverty, according to the paper.

Jaijee's real agenda, for which the claim of mass suicides is merely a medium, appears to be to attack state controls on the rural economy and to pave the way for outright control of agriculture by feudal landlords. In key senses, this attack is wholly disingenuous. Policies like the minimum support price (MSP) structure have served to protect farmers from market fluctuations, and not to deprive them of legitimate earnings.

Although right-wing ideologues argue that the wholesale price index rose higher than the MSP until 1990, they ignore the fact that the incomes of farmers increased steadily throu-gh state support for higher productivity. Ex-perts such as Shergill and Jawaharlal Nehru Uni-versity's G.S. Bhalla are unanimous that restructuring the countryside around predatory capitalism will in the long run be disastrous for farmers.

Claims like those made by the Jaijee, though polemically eff-ective, are founded on a misuse of data to serve a political agenda. It is not coincidental that the claims regarding a high suicide rate have come from a representative of the MASR. Along with other Punjab-based chauvinistic groups claiming to represent the cause of human rights, the MASR has consistently sought to discredit the peace of 1992, alleging that it was founded on genocide. The new claims of mass poverty and deprivation in the countryside serve the same reactionary politics in important ways. Jaijee wrote to Chief Minister Badal that there was no justice in bleeding one's own State to benefit another, and that the agricultural economy of Punjab had been brought to the point of disaster. This attitude smacks of colonialism at its worst. For an illustration of the mentality of the far right in Punjab, one need look no further. Serious academic research, of the kind Shergill, Gurmail Singh and others have undertaken and the IDC has sponsored, tells the truth.

If the problems of rural Punjab are to be addressed meaningfully, what is needed is scientific research, and not polemical posturing.