How farmers can put an end to suicides
A farmer committed suicide in the heart of the capital at a rally meant to promise him a better future. I often wonder why we don't hear news of farmers from poorer states such as Bihar committing suicide, and why only those from rich states like Maharashtra, Kerala and Gujarat choose to end their lives.
To a large extent, I feel, farmers in Bihar depend on subsistence farming - they grow vegetables and cereals on most of their land. Usually, subsistence farming is not profitable, but at least it ensures that they do not starve, deterring them from taking such extreme steps.
I am a farmer's son from Bihar. I spent my childhood in the fields, helping my family farm their five acres of fragmented land. It helped feed six of us. We grew up in a happy family, before my father borrowed from a bank to buy a tractor to turn our subsistence farming into a profit-making business. Over the years, the loans kept rising and our crops failed. After a few years, the ever rising loan became my family's main concern, and to be honest, it was almost a death trap. Somehow, we managed to eke out a living by finding work outside of farming to bail us out of the debt. But it was the farmer loan waiver scheme launched in 2008, which finally settled it.
Looking back, I feel it was our greed to earn more from our land that trapped us.
Farmers confront this situation even today - in every part of the country, they are in distress, and the sheer politics and lack of intent to solve their problems has rendered them hopeless, often forcing them to end their lives.
They borrow with hopes of a better yield, and when that fails, kill themselves. However, failing crops is only part of the problem - the other reason is that they do not get a good price for their produce in the market even when they harvest a bumper crop. Excessive supply manages to exhaust the demand for crops, leaving the farmer poorer while hoarders and middlemen buy the bumper produce at a throwaway prices and make a killing. In such cases, farmers are left with no choice. A case in point is the 2011 incident in Uttar Pradesh, where potato growing farmers from Agra threw their produce on the roads because prices crashed over bumper harvest across the country.
It's time farmers thought about themselves and stopped worrying about the country. It's not just the failing crops, but also the burden of loans that kills them. In troubled areas like Vidarbha, they must return to subsistence farming based on generic seeds and fertilisers. They must grow what they can eat, and not plant what they can't in hopes of better profit. At the end of the day, the fertility of our land depends on how we use it over the years.