While Indian stock markets soar, there is a spurt in farmers suicides.

An Indian farmer is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.

There is excitement all around. Market continued to rally for the second straight day on the expectation of a new and stable government. As per reports, the NSE 50-share Nifty crossed the 7,000 level for the first time in the history to touch 7,020 points. The BSE Sensex rallied 550 points on May 12 to close at 23,551 points. Some market analysts are pointing to the Sensex breaching the 25,000 mark in a day or so.

While the huge road show at the Dalal Street is what dons the national headlines, the loud cries of wailing farm widows have been lost in the noise and cacophony of electioneering. There is a renewed spurt in the number of farm suicides across the country. My colleague Dr G V Ramanjaneyulu of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Hyderabad, today said that five farmers have been committing suicide ever day in the Vidharbha, and another five in the Telengana region. He has based his calculations on newspaper reports from the region. In Bundelkhand, civil society activist Sanjay Singh says in the past fortnight there have been on an average 2-3 farm suicides every day.

In Punjab, the food bowl of the country, Indian Express (May 13, 2014) reports ten farmers have committed suicide in last 40 days.

In Bundelkhand region, which cuts across Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, 105 farm suicides were reported in the first three months of the year. Till Mar 31, Sanjay Singh had recorded 105 farmers who had taken their own lives. Reeling under mounting debt, these farmers had given up when the freak weather hit the standing crop in several parts of central India. In neighbouring Maharashtra, some 27 farmers had ended their life when hailstorm had flattened their standing crop in the month of March.

Only a day before, I read news reports stating two debt-ridden farmer brothers, Jugraj Singh (33) and Jagtar Singh (30) consumed poison to end their lives. They belonged to Hassanpur village in Mansa district of Punjab. They had taken a loan of Rs 3-lakh from the Punjab Cooperative Agriculture Development Bank in Budlada. They were issued a notice by the bank for non-payment of the pending amount, and unable to repay they preferred to end their lives. Unfortunately, their father had also committed suicide some 13 years ago.

While Punjab has launched a fresh study into farmer suicides, it has also set up a committee to frame a policy on farm suicides. This follows a directive from the Punjab and Haryana High Court to spell out a concrete policy framework to tackle suicides in the farm sector. In Punjab, 6,926 farmers and farm labourers have committed suicides ,in the ten year period 2001-10.

There are no dearth of studies to know why the farmers are being increasingly driven to end their own lives. Similarly, there is no end to to the number of committees set up at the State and Central level to come out with recommendations to end the malaise. So much so that the outgoing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made a visit to suicide hotspot Vidharbha soon after assuming office in 2004, but failed to stem the sordid tide. Planning Commission too was forced to screen the Bollywood film Pipli Live in Yojna Bhavan sometimes back showing clearly its casual approach in addressing agrarian crisis. 

The serial death dance on the farm however continues unabated.

The spurt in farm suicides in the past few weeks is a demonstration of the apathy and neglect with which policy makes have treated agriculture. In fact, I find a kind of contempt that prevails in policy planning towards farming and agriculture. Farmers are being treated as if they are a burden on the society, and all efforts are to force them to abandon agriculture and migrate into the cities. The sooner the nation offloads this burden, the better it will be country's growth and development is what is generally perceived. I therefore don't see much of hope for India's farmers. Unless of course the new government decides to take a re-look at agriculture and adopts policies that brings back the pride in farming. The approach has to be on how to make agriculture economically viable and environmentally sustainable.        

When will India stop treating farmer suicides as another set of statistics? 

Subsidy for the hungry is not an economic misadventure.

For the last few years, every time I have participated in TV discussions on the Budget day, I have noticed how the stock markets play its mischievous card. Before the finance minister gets up to present the Budget in Parliament, the Sensex invariably slumps. This indicates the nervousness in the market. As the finance minister goes on reading his speech, the Sensex also steadily rises. This is nothing but a blackmail strategy that markets use across the globe.

So when a day after the UPA government passed the Food Security Bill, the stock markets fell by 590 points, I wasn't the least bit surprised. Nor should it be considered as an expression of an economic blow. It is simply the market's way to express its discomfort and contempt at the poor getting the subsidy benefit.

The Food Bill is expected to cost Rs1.25 lakh crore.

This has prompted the industry barons, economic commentators, and the business media to repeatedly ask the question: Where will the money come from? More so, at a time when the Indian economy is in crisis, and the rupee is in free fall, such a massive financial outlay for 810 million poor and hungry is being touted as a political misadventure. There is no need to feed the poor, the money should have instead been diverted to create infrastructure, and in the bargain create more jobs, goes the refrain.

This is not the first time that such a question has been raised. I remember when the UPA-I announced writing off Rs 62,000 crore (which later became Rs 72,000 crore) of outstanding loans to farmers, a similar hue and cry was raised. I too was faced with a volley of questions on TV channels the day the farm loan waiver was announced. When I asked where the resources for the Sixth Pay Commission, bringing in an additional burden of over Rs1.5 lakh crores every year, came from; there was no answer.

`Subsidies' is a bad word when it comes to the poor. The argument is that subsidies are a drain on the national exchequer, and add on to the fiscal deficit. So whether it is fuel subsidy, fertiliser subsidy or food subsidy, they have perpetually been on the chopping block. All these subsidies not only have provided safety net to India's teeming millions, but have also helped the country become self-sufficient in food and dairy production. It has provided a cushion to the aam aadmi against continuously rising inflation, and at the same time help minimise the impact of rising costs resulting from privatisation of health and education services.

But interestingly, while all eyes are on the subsidies being given to the poor, there is no mention of the massive subsidies being doled out to business and industry years after year. The only difference being that these subsidies are not called subsidies (because it is a bad word) but are classified as efficiency incentives. Since 2005-06, the government has been giving tax concessions, including income-tax concessions, to the industry which is clubbed under the category of `revenue foregone'. Till this year, the tax concessions to industry total to more than Rs 30 lakh crore. In this year's Budget, finance minister P. Chidambaram has allocated Rs 5.73 lakh crore as revenue foregone.

I didn't see the Sensex crashing to express its displeasure at this massive subsidy . Nor do I find any mainline economist ever mentioning that Rs 30 lakh-crore was a wasteful expenditure. After all, despite such a massive subsidy support, the industry output is in minus, the manufacturing sector is gasping for breath, and exports are not picking up. India is faced with jobless growth, and we see a spate of suicides in the urban areas across the country among those who lost their jobs. Does it not mean that the Rs 30 lakh-crore subsidy has gone into a black hole?

In past three years, roughly Rs15 lakh-crore has been given to industry as tax concessions. If this money had been recovered and invested in public infrastructure, not only the entire fiscal deficit would have been wiped out, but lakhs of jobs could have been created.

In addition, despite the downturn in economy, the Reserve Bank of India has admitted that India Inc. is sitting comfortably over a cash reserve of  Rs10 lakh-crore. There is no need for India to bend over backwards to attract foreign direct investments when its own corporates were sitting over a mountain of cash. Forking it out could have created investor's confidence and improved the business sentiments. The rupee would start to look up. The ensuing economic crisis should have been evident in the period 2004-2008 itself when India's economy grew at nine per cent. Behind all the jubilation, a startling study done on behalf of the Planning Commission should have served as an eye-opener.

Accordingly, in the period of high economic growth, 14 million jobs were lost in agriculture, and another 5.3 million in manufacturing. In other words, both agriculture and manufacturing sector became victims of high economic growth. Subsequently, it has now been shown that for the first time in history the number of landless agricultural workers has swelled to more than those who own land.

Agriculture has become a losing proposition. Every day, some 2,500 farmers are quitting agriculture and probably migrating to cities looking for menial jobs. This is no `inclusive growth'. Kaushik Basu, the former chief economic advisor to Prime Minister and now a chief economist with the World Bank, has himself admitted that the time of `inclusive growth' is over. He has tweeted, suggesting `intelligent growth' to be the new plank of economic growth.

The only way to bring prosperity into the rural areas, and thereby boost the country's economy, is by making agriculture sustainable and economically viable. Most importantly, the road to all-around economic development passes through the village of Hiware Bazaar in Maharashtra.Once a drought-prone village, where rural-urban migration was the only way to survive, this village now boasts of 60 millionaires.

This village has effectively demonstrated how an ecologically devastated landscape can become a bustling market place. It is, therefore, time to invest in agriculture, rural development and food security. That's where the future of India lies.

Source: Deccan Chronicle, Aug 29, 2013. bit.ly/1ciCseP