Misplaced Stress

ON 22 APRIL, while Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, was speaking at a rally at Jantar Mantar, in the heart of the capital, a man named Gajendra Singh, from the district of Dausa in Rajasthan, died at the venue. The death was immediately reported across the media as a farmer suicide, but, as more information emerged, it grew less clear whether Singh’s death was a suicide or an accident, and whether farming was, in fact, his primary occupation.

Nevertheless, with the issue of rural distress already prominent in the public discourse, the incident sparked yet another round of pitched arguments about farmer suicides. Since the death occurred at a rally organised by Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, the chief minister was denied the opportunity to lead the debate, and the Congress vice-president, Rahul Gandhi, was free to position himself as the politician speaking for farmers. In mid May, he travelled to Telangana to meet the families of farmers who had committed suicide; in turn, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party questioned the Congress’s record on the issue.

With the matter now a game for scoring political points, economic commentators such as Swaminathan Aiyar and Surjit Bhalla, who broadly stand for market liberalism, were quick to try and rebut claims that farmer suicides are an issue that requires policy intervention.

On 25 April, Bhalla wrote in the Indian Express, “In 2013, there were 1.3 lakh suicides, out of which only one-third were female. So should we pass some legislation to protect the ‘males’ from suicide? Should legislation be brought in to alleviate male distress?” A few days later, in the Times of India, Swaminathan Aiyar argued, “The vast majority of suicides are of non farmers. Why are their deaths treated as lesser tragedies than those of farmers?”

These arguments are facetious. No one suggests that suicides by farmers are greater tragedies than those by anyone else. But if a large number of farmer suicides are triggered by a set of common causes that can be addressed by the government, that is sufficiently strong reason to argue for official intervention. In this scenario, it does not matter whether farmers commit suicide in higher, lower or equal proportions compared to the rest of the population.

Aiyar argued that farmer suicides should not be regarded as a separate category. “The global suicide pattern shows no close link with farming, poverty or welfare,” he wrote. “The overwhelming cause of suicide is mental stress, not financial stress. ... Mental stress (and hence suicides) will doubtless rise in times of financial stress. But the underlying mental issues cannot be cured by loan waivers and subsidies.” This is an obfuscation. No one claims that loan waivers and subsidies can cure mental health issues. The question at hand is whether, by addressing factors common to such suicides, government interventions can help prevent mental distress from leading to suicide.

My belief that there are indeed such factors stems from my own reportage. I first reported on farmer suicides in 2002, when I spent close to a month in Warangal district, then in Andhra Pradesh and now in Telangana. There, 14 farmers committed suicide between December 2001 and January 2002. That figure was not culled from a National Crime Records Bureau report. Rather, these were recorded cases where the state police, acting on behalf of a government unwilling to accept the reality of such suicides, had been reluctantly forced to admit the causes.

One of the 14 farmers was Kandlakonta Uppalaiah, of Govardhanagiri village. An FIR filed at the Ranganathapally Police Station stated that he “didn’t get returns for his agriculture and couldn’t pay back loans he incurred on account of agriculture so in despair and on 13.12. 2001 in his house at night he drank pesticide (monocrotphos).” Uppalaiah owned three acres of non-irrigated land. His wife, Yadalakshmi, told me that two years earlier the cotton crop had been hit badly by pests. In August 2000, Uppalaiah borrowed R27,000 from a local moneylender, at an interest rate of 3 percent a month. But although he pumped pesticides all over his fields, the crop failed. The next year, he chose to sow another cotton variety, but that crop failed as well. On 8 November 2001, he borrowed another R10,000, and when it seemed he would lose his third crop in a row, he drank the Monocrotophos.

Similar stories repeated in the ten or so cases I examined. In the Telangana region, where very little land was irrigated, farmers had begun growing cotton on a large scale only over the previous decade. Initially, the yields were good, leading more farmers to take to the crop. But attacks by pests, especially the larvae of the moth Heliothus, intensified with each passing year. Some farmers tried using excessive amounts of pesticide, and they did better than others. Soon, everyone was using high pesticide doses. When crops failed despite this, farmers who had borrowed money for sinking a well or buying pesticide found themselves in trouble. Repeated failures meant farmers could see no way out of a cycle of debt.

Throughout this period, which extended over a number of years, most farmers never saw a government agriculture extension worker. For advice on seeds and on the type and quantity of pesticide to use, they depended on shopkeepers and the ubiquitous representatives of seed and pesticide firms. It was in the interest of these people to increase the sales of their products rather than worry about the impact on farmers.

Two years later, I went back to Andhra Pradesh. A Congress government under YS Rajasekhara Reddy had taken over from N Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party, who had been swept out of office. The new government, concerned about farmer suicides, which had become a major election issue, announced compensation for the families of these farmers. This set off a fresh spate of suicides, with some debt-burdened farmers seeing the compensation as a way to help their families pay off at least part of what they owed.

Since compensation was to be awarded only in “genuine” cases, each suspected farmer suicide was throughly scrutinised by the police. When I reached Guntur district, I discovered that of the 18 suicides reported in May 2004, inquiries had been concluded in 13 cases, and six of these had been found to be “genuine.”

K Purna Chandra Rao’s was one of these “genuine” farmer suicides. A government note on the suicides in the district stated that “the deceased has committed suicide on account of the burden on him due to debts incurred for agricultural purpose and recommended for sanction of financial assistance.”

Rao owned four acres of land and had leased an additional six. The previous two years had seen below normal rainfall, and he was already burdened by debt. The crops he sowed—chillies and cotton—were susceptible to the vagaries of both the market and the weather. His wife, Kodal Varlaxmi, told me, “Part of his cotton crop failed and the prices of chillies crashed. On May 20, when he went to sell his chilly crop, he was offered a rate of R1,850 a quintal.” The price the previous year was R4,000 a quintal. “When he left the house on the night of May 22, I thought he had gone to the fields,” Varlaxmi said. “A man found him dead around midnight.” He too had consumed Monocrotophos, with some 7-Up. His accumulated debt stood at R5.12 lakh.

The 14 suicides in Warangal between December 2001 and January 2002, as well as the six found “genuine” in Guntur in May 2004, did not influence the national-level statistics parsed by Aiyar, or have a significant impact on the macro-level statistics that fuel much of the discourse on farmer suicides. But what is clear from studying them is that while there was no single factor to explain them, each such suicide had a number of causes in common with the rest.

The farmers who took this extreme step usually cultivated cash crops such as cotton and chillies, which are either not part of the government’s procurement system or are inadequately covered by it. They were usually marginal farmers working on small, unirrigated landholdings of their own, or on land they had leased. At least part of what they borrowed came from private sources, and they had almost no interaction with the state or central government’s agricultural departments. Even so, very rarely was suicide the result of the failure of a single crop. Rather, it came at the end of a slow process, of mounting debt and paltry earnings, from which the farmer saw no way out.

Many of these common-sense observations, evident to anyone who has reported on such cases from on the ground, were recently echoed in a study by Jonathan Kennedy and Lawrence King of Cambridge University, who found “a significant positive relationship between the percentage of marginal farmers, cash crop production, and indebted farmers, and suicide rates.”

In particularly bad years, these deaths add up, district by district, to be significantly noticeable even to observers of overall statistics. Consider the following table which, year by year, lists out the number of suicides by farmers across India (as counted by the National Crime Records Bureau) against the deviation from normal in the annual monsoon rainfall, between June and September (as measured by the India Meteorological Institute).

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Year	Number of suicides by farmers	Monsoon rainfall percentage departure from normal
2000	16,603	-7.8
2001	16,415	-7.8
2002	17,971	-19.2
2003	17,164	2.3
2004	18,241	-13.8
2005	17,131	-1.3
2006	17,060	-0.4
2007	16,632	5.7
2008	16,196	-1.7
2009	17,368	-21.8
2010	15,964	2.0
2011	14,027	1.6
2012	13,754	-7.1
2013	11,772	5.7

The NCRB figures for suicides by farmers are contested, but they reveal one simple fact. Years with notably bad monsoons—2002, 2004 and 2009—show spikes in farmer suicides against an overall decreasing trend. Each of those years saw an increase of more than 1,000 deaths over the preceding year.

Aiyar acknowledged this part of the problem when he wrote that “mental stress (and hence suicides) will doubtless rise in times of financial stress”—clearly, the failure of the rains imposes financial hardship on a great number of farmers. But he failed to mention that there are ways for the government to help farmers deal with this financial stress, or ensure that it never arises in the first place.

Agricultural experts have long suggested steps to ameliorate the problem, but these have never been seriously implemented. Among their suggestions is the proposal to bring the leasing of agricultural land under a legal framework, which would allow farmers to access credit from regulated sources, as opposed to leaving them to the informal money-lending systems they are compelled to use now. Experts also recommend redesigning crop insurance to offer greater protection to individual farmers; current policies require companies to pay out claims only if a significant portion of the crop in a particular region, say an entire tehsil, is destroyed. More robust price stabilisation mechanisms, such as minimum support prices—for practical purposes, currently restricted to rice and wheat—can serve as stronger buffers against market fluctuations; with the government compensating farmers if prices fall below these levels. As they do in several European countries and the United States, these stabilisation measures should also include government intervention to ensure that the total acreage planted with a particular crop does not exceed what is sustainable in the market. The Indian government should invest more in planning and forecasting yields, as well as in improved support for and outreach to farmers.

It is possible, of course, to argue with this list of remedies, and it is possible to suggest other alternatives. But it is not credible to claim, as Bhalla and Aiyar have, that such suicides are of no concern to the government.