Debt trap: Farm labourers account for half of suicides

Vishav Bharti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 22

Agricultural labourers account for half of the farm suicides in the state, but they found no mention in the Chief Minister’s debt waiver announcement on Monday.

The CM said today that his government did not have a record of the number of landless labourers or their debt. He proposed that a five-member committee be set up by the Speaker to look into such labourers’ issues and give its recommendations.

According to the state government’s survey of agrarian suicides, conducted by three varsities, 6,926 farmers/agricultural labourers took their lives due to the debt trap between 2000 and 2010. Among them, around 43 per cent were labourers.

After a fresh survey of suicides, the three universities of the state are in the process of submitting a report to the government. As per experts involved in the study, almost 7,000 farm suicides have been reported in the past five years, of which agricultural labourers accounted for more than 40 per cent. Successive governments have been apathetic towards the woes of farm labourers. In 2007, when the SAD-BJP alliance came to power, it first refused to include farm labourers in the debt-related agrarian suicide survey, which was conducted to give compensation to the affected families.

“It was after an agitation by several labour organisations that the government agreed to include them in the survey,” said Lachman Sewewala, general secretary of the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union.

After the survey, when the SAD-BJP government gave a compensation of Rs 2 lakh each to around 4,600 families of suicide victims in 2014, almost one-third among them were labourers.

Labour organisations found that on an average, a labour household of which the breadwinner committed suicide was under a debt of Rs 70,000, even as its annual income was just Rs 19,000.

According to experts, a farm labourer usually borrows money from private players as he doesn’t have anything to pledge to get a loan from banks.

Ranjit Singh Ghuman, a professor in economics at the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, Chandigarh, said: “A farm labourer generally doesn’t inherit any asset. He inherits debt, which is passed on from one generation to the next. And to repay the debt, he doesn’t have any asset to bank upon except his capacity to do labour. In such a scenario, the government is being unfair to the poorest of the poor.”