Supreme Court is trying to save the farmer, why not the government?
The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre about its policies to prevent farmer suicides in the country, saying that paying compensation to victims' families is not the real solution.
A bench comprising Chief Justice JS Khehar, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice SK Kaul said the issue of farmer suicides is of "extreme importance" and it is surprising the government has not taken any action to address the causes behind the deaths, happening for so many decades.
The bench said it was sad and unfortunate that farmers were killing themselves on account of crop failure and inability to repay agricultural loans.
"We feel that you (government) are going in a wrong direction. Farmers take loans from banks and when they are unable to repay, they commit suicide. The remedy to the problem is not paying money to farmers after the suicide, but you should have schemes to prevent this," said the bench, expressing its displeasure.
Farmer suicides are a wrenching and contentious issue and are surging upward even as the number of farmers in states is going down. It is a decades-old national affliction that is as tragic as it is complex and is a serious threat to India’s most critical economic sector.
Haven't we all seen story after story running the same script: the gaunt, grizzled faces of cotton farmers of Vidarbha and those in Andhra Pradesh staring out of their marriage portraits, or ration cards, as the restless eye of the electronic age ranges over their grieving families and politicians swoop down with a consolatory dole as they become another statistic of rural despair.
The most recent addition after the highly popular Peepli Live is a film evocatively titled Cotton for my Shroud that details the plight of Vidarbha farmers.
A latest report has very distressing news on the farm front. Farmer suicides in the country rose by 42 per cent between 2014 and 2015, according to just released “Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2015” report from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
It recorded 5,650 suicides by farmers and cultivators in 2014. The figure rose to 8,007 in the latest data. In the fluid world of statistics, numbers may not always tell the true story. But they do show us where rural India is headed as a society.
Maharashtra witnessed 4,291 suicides of farmers and agricultural labourers in 2015 - the highest across the country. Karnataka, second on the list, witnessed 1,569 suicides.
Karnataka is the new epicentre of suicides. In 2015-16, as many as 1,475 farmer suicides were reported, which was the highest in recent years. The year before, 122 were reported; in 2013-14, 58 farmers committed suicide and in 2012-13, the number was 77.
Numerous NGOs say the figures underscore the magnitude of the problem because they don’t include cases stamped as doubtful. Moreover, the Indian government defines “farmer” narrowly, usually as the holder of a land title, which many farmers do not have, and also excludes agricultural day labourers - a category that is increasing even as the “cultivators” or land titled farmers decrease - and many women, who get categorised as simply “wives” - even though they frequently perform the most painstaking farming work.
Currently, the government does little more than grant compensation to the families of farmers who take their lives, which many consider an incentive. The cash compensation does help them tide over the immediate problem of feeding the family. But there is politics here also.
The compensation can be denied if ownership of the land is disputed or if the death is not judged to be linked to indebtedness or the farm crisis.
For many bereaved families, receiving compensation remains out of bounds. The agricultural department does not accept all suicides as compensation-worthy. A department official said: “If a farmer is unable to clear loans taken for agriculture from authorised banks or financiers, it is considered a farmer suicide by the Karnataka government. Loans taken for other purposes, or even agricultural loans taken from unauthorised financial institutions, are not accepted as causing farmer suicides."
The roots of despair of the Indian farmer have been well researched and documented. They are a toxic blend of: livelihoods drained away by spiralling debt; soil tired on heavy doses of chemicals-fertilisers, crops and livestock destroyed by drought or unseasonable monsoon rains associated with climate change; plummeting water tables from relentless water mining; the loss of agricultural land to development; a collapse in cotton prices and dependence on expensive genetic-engineered hybrid seeds; penury and debt on account of dependence on predatory moneylenders, and near absence of rural mental health services and public awareness of mental health disease.
Farmer suicides are simply a reflection or a symptom of how fragile the farm economy is. Even a small aberration in the weather - unseasonal rains, high winds, dry weather and drought - multiplies the risk factor for farmers, taking it to unmanageable levels. Livelihood security for any farming family, therefore, hangs by a slender thread.
The suicide rate for farmers is 48 per cent higher than any other profession. In the 20 years since the Indian government first started keeping track of farmer suicides, about 3,00,000 farmers have ended their lives. Farmer suicides are a red stain of shame on the democratic pretentions of the Indian government as it continues to bungle the handling of its agricultural policies and programmes.
Nothing is simple about the farmer suicide phenomenon. In the farmers' plight, all strands of an economy in transition intersect. To a degree, the suicides reflect the farmers' bafflement at the gradual, and erratic, withdrawal of the state. They have felt the cost of reforms - but have yet to see the benefits.
The high rate of farmer suicides is often first traced to the trauma of the early 1990s - when India, devastated by financial crisis, embraced a raft of free market reforms, kickstarting the current era of economic liberalisation.
There are two triggers for the suicides. The first at the time of sowing, when the cash strapped farmer is pushed to buy seeds he can ill afford, so he takes credit. The next is at the time of harvest, when he arrives in the market and realises that he will not get the price that will enable him to repay the loan. That’s when the desolate fellow has no option but to consume pesticide.
A closer look would suggest that there is a broad pattern to farmer suicides. Most of these farmers had little appetite for risk earlier. They were happy with the modest yield that kept their home and hearths running. Lured by the promises of new foreign seeds, the farmers started availing big ticket loans to invest in expensive seeds, tagged with high yields, in what they saw a fair commercial risk.
If the math was right it was certainly worth it. But unfortunately we don’t have sophisticated financial risk-hedging instruments at the lower segment of farmers. Nor do we have super-efficient supply chains that should support this type of savvy ventures. Any adverse development can send the farmer into a tailspin and then the familiar script runs through.
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| For many bereaved families, receiving compensation remains out of bounds. Photo: Reuters |
Anoop Sadanadan, a professor of political science based at Syracuse University, has argued that farmer suicides should be attributed not to agricultural practices but rather financial ones.
In a paper published two years back, he says that farmer suicides were concentrated in five of India’s 28 states - and that those five offered the least institutional credit to farmers, leaving them to take loans from rapacious sharks at stratospheric interest rates.
The government is introducing several policy interventions that can equip farmers to negotiate the competitive markets. A number of initiatives are being taken by voluntary organisations to improve their mental health profile through therapeutic and behavioural techniques.
A field-based research study in The Lancet suggests that actual suicides may be 35-40 per cent higher than officially recorded. The study concludes: “Most Indians do not have community or support services for the prevention of suicide and have restricted access to care for mental illnesses associated with suicide, especially access to treatment for depression, which has been shown to reduce suicidal behaviour. Reductions in binge alcohol drinking through regulations, higher alcohol taxation, or brief interventions in primary care might also reduce suicide deaths.”
The abysmal state of mental healthcare in the country made matters worse. Most government-run hospitals do not have psychiatric drugs, and visiting a private shrink and sustaining the treatment - usually a long drawn out affair - is an expensive proposition for most families. The ignorance and callous attitude towards psychiatric ailments, coupled with social stigma, dissuades most from seeking help. Counselling centres are an urban phenomena.
There may be some light at the bottom of this abyss, as a grassroots community mental health programme, called Vishram or the Vidarbha Stress and Health Programme, has been engaged in therapeutic counseling of distressed farmers, which has definitely improved their mental health profile.
Launched a few years ago, it is designed to establish a sustainable rural mental health programme to address mental health issues in rural India and mental aberrations that abet suicide, such as alcohol abuse and depression in the agrarian community.
According to an evaluation of the intensive 18-month programme, the prevalence of depression was reduced by 22 per cent in a year, while suicidal tendencies were reduced by nearly 51 per cent.
The programme, implemented with the assistance of an NGO called Prakriti, deployed health workers from within the community, some with no background in mental health. These workers were trained to raise mental health awareness and provide “psychological first-aid”. The programme also included counsellors who imparted mental health literacy. The third line of workers consisted of expert psychiatrists, who are qualified to provide medications for more serious mental health disorders.
Dr Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is the man behind this programme. Patel wants suicide to be seen as a public health issue. "In India we haven't done good research on farmer suicides and in terms of mental health, this has always been seen as a social issue. But if you look around the world at least 50 per cent of farmers, and adults who kill themselves, would have had a depressive disorder or an alcohol use disorder, these two being the main mental health conditions,” he says.
Frontline workers interact directly with the agrarian population, talking about the “tension” they were experiencing and by raising awareness about the stress episodes they were undergoing and ways to cope with them. For many farmers, sharing and ventilating their toxic thoughts was cathartic.
Since they are drawn from the same community, the healthcare workers are familiar with the environment and therefore better able to empathise. They combine their new cognitive skills with traditional wisdom for working out strategies to strengthen the resilience mechanism of these farmers.
Another significant impact of the programme was a sixfold increase in the ratio of people seeking mental care. The proportion of those with depression who sought help rose from a mere 4.2 per cent to 27.2 per cent. This in itself highlights the success of the programme in spreading awareness and raising mental health literacy. As depression is one of the leading causes of suicide, this could explain the sharp dip in suicide numbers as well.
The worsening woes of Indian farmers can hardly be neglected by the leaders of a country where two-thirds of people live in the countryside and many are being forced to head to cities to escape the wrath at their farms. Gandhi’s declaration that agriculture is the soul of Indian economy is as relevant as the man himself.
When India became independent, the contribution of agriculture to the economy was 50 per cent; it is now 15 per cent. Employment in the agro sector was to the extent of 88 per cent; now it is 66 per cent. Rural wages have fallen to their lowest.
For every Indian farmer who takes his own life, a family is hounded by the debt he leaves behind, typically resulting in children dropping out of school to become farmhands, and surviving family members themselves frequently committing suicide out of hopelessness and despair.
The Indian government's response to the crisis - largely in the form of limited debt relief and compensation programmes - has failed to address the magnitude and scope of the problem or its underlying causes.
There are too many questions that seek quick answers. Some groundbreaking reforms are needed as the first steps in breaking the cycle of desperation and misery that so many Indian farming communities face. We must respect the ominous signs in the country’s farmlands which are claiming their debt in the form of lives of farmers who own them.
If the government is serious about reviving agriculture, it ought to act fast. We have the tools, but we need to summon the political will. This is the only way we can save thousands of farmers from the deadly noose.