A debt on Indian conscience

Sukhpal Singh

There have been many studies on agrarian distress and farmers’ suicide in different parts of India during the last decade, including those in Punjab. Such studies generally focus on a profile of the suicide victims, mostly land owning farmers, and reasons thereof. In this context, the book by Lakhwinder Singh, K S Bhangoo and Rakesh Sharma makes a departure as it compares the suicide victims (both land-owning farmers and landless farm workers, the latter very rarely studied as cases of distressed farmers) with their similar non-suicide land-owning farmer and landless farm worker counterparts. The study is praiseworthy as it is based on a large sample size, totalling 1,392 farmers and workers. The sample comprised 510 each of suicide victims and control group farmers, and 186 each of suicide victim and control group farm workers across 22 villages of the three most suicide-prone districts of the state that is Sangrur, Bathinda and Mansa. 

The book focuses on the characteristics of rural households, magnitude of crisis and causes of suicide. The agrarian crisis in the form of suicides is seen as the result of poor returns from farming leading to indebtedness. An important finding is that marginal and small farmers were 81 per cent of the victims and 72 per cent of the control group respondents. This is a quite significant finding as the landholdings in the study districts are relatively large. Further, victims were in general smaller than their control group counterparts, had higher unirrigated land, and were much more dependent on canal irrigation in one of the districts. This suggests that suicide victims were structurally more constrained in their farming enterprises. 

As expected, the share of commission agents was much higher in the outstanding loans of victims compared with that of the control group. Therefore, it is not the amount of debt, but the source of debt, which could be the differentiating factor between suicide victims and those still surviving. The causes of suicide mostly pertained to indebtedness, economic distress, crop failure, besides drug addiction being responsible for nine per cent of the cases among farmers as well as workers. 

It can be argued that if a farmer is in distress, he should be able to dispose of a part of his land instead of taking his own life. However, the study shows that only 10 per cent of the suicide victim farmer households sold some land. This proves that it is not easy to sell land as it may not be under the direct control of the individual under distress or may be perceived by him as a bigger humiliation than suicide for his family.  

The authors suggest short-term relief measures like higher compensation for suicide victims, waiving institutional and non-institutional debt of the victims, and placing a moratorium on the debt from commission agents, but propose a lower compensation for the farm worker families which is devoid of any logic. As long-term solutions, they mention revival of the canal system and non-farm employment generation through policy mechanisms, propose crop diversification and a break from paddy farming to save ground-water resources, and suggest provision of universal crop insurance.

Crop diversification has been missed from the analysis, though it was important to examine how far it could play a role at the household level in increasing incomes or stabilising them. Also, the study does not enquire into sources of income — farm and non-farm separately, though it shows that all of them across districts had negative net incomes after meeting the expenditure. 

Despite these minor shortcomings, the book provides a large database and analysis on the issue which is very valuable. It is a must read for all those interested in understanding the nature and severity of the crisis of the farm sector in the state. Since the study pertains to 2010-11, there is a value in undertaking another survey of the sampled households to examine their status after five years to understand the dynamics of agrarian crisis.