1984

An Epidemic of Farmer Suicides:
The State of Punjab - Part VI

GUNISHA KAUR

 

 

 

Punjab has been a hotspot of human rights violations and activism since the birth of the Indian nation in 1947. The history of human rights abuses in the state has contributed significantly to the present economic, environmental and medical crisis in Punjab.

In this multi-part series, we explore the emergent issues in the state, with a focus on farmer suicides, female feticide and infanticide, ecological damage, river water rights, rising rates of diseases, mental health, and drug and alcohol abuse.

 

Amarjit Singh, a small farmer from Barnala whose father committed suicide a few years back, says: “My father could not read or write, so he could not calculate the amount of loan he had incurred. Once it reached a staggering sum, he was publicly threatened by the moneylender and committed suicide. If I am asked to pay my father’s debt, I will also have to commit suicide.”

Every thirty minutes, a farmer in India commits suicide.

In the early years of the Green Revolution, Punjab ranked as one of India’s most prosperous states. The economy experienced an unprecedented rise, and the Green Revolution was hailed a massive success by national and international communities.

The sudden influx of cash caused the standard of living to inflate drastically, and successful farmers responded by building massive mansions, hiring agricultural labors to manage their land, and purchasing expensive farming machinery.

Furthermore, the consumption of alcohol increased in social parties and ceremonies, and dowries became increasingly popular and lavish to reflect the economic status of the bride’s family.

Due to the unsustainable nature of Green Revolution farming, the economic situation of Punjab rapidly reversed course within a matter of years. By the 1980s, Punjab began to experience a decline in its economic and environmental status.

Whereas input costs remained high, minimum support price set by the government remained low and markets for the sale of farm product became saturated. Adding to the economic decline, overexploitation of natural resources led to the ecological
degeneration of Punjab. By the 1990s, the falling farm production led to an additional decline in household income.

Agriculture in Punjab depends heavily on a system of loans and repayment - year after year, farmers rely on loan money to afford the purchase of agricultural inputs.

Repayment is contingent on farm production. Models for the rural credit system include both institutional and non-institutional loans, though there is an alarming lack of legitimate, institutional credit available to farmers. Beyond the limited availability of institutional loans, the barriers to obtaining loans pushes farmers to rely on non-institutional credit;
 the reception of loans typically averages 33 weeks of work, 14 trips to the bank, and 4,016 rupees in total transaction costs.

Although non-institutional loans are typically easier to obtain, they also tend to entail much higher interest rates than loans tendered by governmental sources. For instance, the interest charged by non-institutional loans have been documented as high as 60%, as compared to the 16-18% charged by governmental sources.

Perhaps as important, testimonies demonstrate that typical moneylenders are ruthless, unregulated, and take advantage of naïve farmers. Provocation by loan sharks often drives farmers to make money for their loan payments through harmful and illegal actions, including such as selling blood and organs on the black market.

Recent studies have found that an astounding 65.4% of farmer households are under debt, with somewhere between 50 to 80% from non-institutional loans. The debt of Punjabi farmers is more than three times the national average. Whereas the national average of debt per farmer stands at Rs. 12,585, the average debt held by each Punjabi farmer is Rs. 41,576.

Unfortunately, marginal and small farmers remain most dependent on the high-interest, non-institutional loans; these loans are taken on by 67% of small farmers and only 37% large farmers. Part of the problem emerges from the issue of usage - while institutional loans are only granted for the purposes of production and investment, marginal and small farmers have been shown to use a higher proportion of their loan money (up to 64%) towards consumptive purposes such as dowries.

The use of loan money for non-productive purposes disqualifies farmers from receiving financial support from the government through an institutional loan.

A number of smaller farmers have tried to break the loan cycle by selling or mortgaging their land to large landholders. With the lack of training and technical inability to branch out from agriculture, small farmers who sell or mortgage their land typically begin working for large farmers as agricultural laborers or landless bonded workers.

This situation helps resolve problems of accruing additional land-based loans year after year, yet the low wages earned by these laborers leads to an equally difficult financial situation: 1) they may not find employment given the influx of migrant labor in the 1980s and 1990s;  2) mechanization has led to a decline in the need for human capital; and 3) employment for laborers is typically only available around the time of harvest (for example, approximately 70 days out of the year in Sangrur district, and 152 days out of the year in Faridkot district).

As the state government has found, the insufficient earnings by laborers often leads to a recurrent dependence on loans from landowners and moneylenders.

Recent evidence points to the central linkage between financial debt, psychological health, and farmer suicide. The Indian Ministry of Finance reports that "indebtedness” emerges as a factor in 86.5% of farmer suicide cases. Other factors include “economic decline,” “problems kept to self,” and “crop failure.”

Unfortunately, no reliable record has been produced to record how many Punjabi farmers have taken their lives. Because its policies consider the act of suicide to be a criminal offense, the actual instances of suicide go largely underreported. As a result, estimates of suicide rates vary significantly. For example, some sectors of the government have denied the significance of the problem; The Government of Punjab, relying on criminal records, acknowledges that between 1988 and 2004, 2,116 farmer suicides took place in the region.

A second estimate draws from the Punjab Farmer's Commission, which estimates around 2,000 farmer suicides per year, or approximately 32,000 suicides over that same 16-year span.

A third party, The Movement Against State Repression has recorded 1,738 suicides in just 91 villages, from one of Punjab’s 20 districts, between 1998 and 2010; the organization places the estimate of the number of suicides at a minimum of 50,000
over two decades.

Finally, the farmers’ union Bhartiya Kisan Union estimates that 90,000 suicides have occurred between 1990 and 2006.

Though exact figures vary, we can be certain that farmer suicide has become an epidemic in Punjab. Debt is unequivocally a significant reason why farmers continue to take their lives. As discussed in part five of this series, this economics also plays a central role in the rise of female infanticide and feticide.

In the final section of this series, we will discuss possible solutions to this web of problems, including increasing institutional loans, micro-lending, and decreasing reliance on the agricultural sector of the economy.

 

[The author is a human rights activist and a physician at Cornell University in New York City. Her research focuses on chronic pain management in survivors of torture, and she has written extensively on human rights violations in India. Her first book, entitled "Lost in History: 1984 Reconstructed" - [http://www.panjabmall.com/storeproduct508.aspx], documents the violence in Punjab that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. The articles in this series draw from her forthcoming book, which discusses the current economic, environmental, and health crisis in Punjab.]

Parts I to V in this series can be accessed from the "1984" section on sikhchic.com.

June 11, 2012 

 

 

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