According to the National Crime Records Bureau, more than one farmer and agricultural worker commit suicide every hour on average, although there was a slight fall in farmer suicides in the country in 2024. Crop failure due to climate change, economic collapse due to rising seed and fertilizer prices, and debt burden are driving many to this drastic action. As Malayalam poet Murugan Kattakada put it, it was when only a thorny branch remained in the field where the thorns had withered, and when the 'theyyams' started performing with drums in the courtyard hidden by the haystack tower that they returned with their livers torn out.
Farmers' groups in all the states of the country have approached the governments demanding that support prices for agricultural crops be ensured, subsidies be provided, and compensation be ensured to those whose crops were damaged due to heavy rains and severe drought. With broken hearts and broken legs, long marches have been taken out to the national capital and major cities like Mumbai and Bhopal. With the India-US Free Trade Agreement, which India is signing under pressure from America and big corporates, the plight of our farmers will be beyond imagination. Once the Agreement comes into effect, American agricultural and dairy products will flow unhindered into the Indian market, which is feared to push our agricultural sector into a deep crisis.
Hundreds of farmers from Punjab and Haryana who were marching from Punjab and Haryana to the national capital to hold a 'Kisan Mahapanchayat' demanding India's withdrawal from the agreement and asking for debt relief measures, were stopped at the border by heavy security forces; those who entered Delhi were arrested at Rajghat and sent back. In Andhra Pradesh, farmers' land is being acquired and given to IT giants including Google to build data centres. A farmer in Rajasthan recently committed suicide over fears of being displaced for the Kotputli-Kishangarh Greenfield Expressway.
When a news story appeared in the newspaper 'The Indian Express' that a farmer was given a subsidy of Rs 99 lakh to cultivate cucumbers, it was a shock to those who thought that the government was taking such a reactionary and vindictive stance towards all the farmers in the country. The name of the farmer who received the subsidy under the scheme implemented by the National Horticulture Board to encourage the cultivation of vegetables and flowers on a commercial basis is Bhagirath Choudhary! Apart from agriculture, he has another job - the Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare at the Centre!!
Senior IAS officer Naresh Pal Gangwar, who was recently appointed as the Higher Education Secretary by the Centre and had been the Secretary of the Animal Welfare Department, was given a subsidy of Rs 1.16 crore through various horticulture schemes for his mother, wife and son in the last five years! After the locals found out much to his disgrace that he had received a subsidy from his own ministry while holding the post of Minister, Bhagirath Chaudhary returned the amount to the bank. But will the constitutional and moral problems in it end just by his returning the money?
It is in a land where poor farmers climb stairs after stairs and wear out their shoes with documents to get small subsidy money, and where banks rush to their yards with confiscation notices at the slightest delay in loan repayments that crores of rupees are being poured into the accounts of ministers and IAS officers. The world is witnessing a pitiful sight of India, an agricultural country, turning into a surrealistic land, with farmers drowning in debt on one hand and ending their lives on their own land, and a government on the other hand distributing that land and the wealth to which they are entitled to serve corporates and its own bureaucrats and political elites.