THE AGRARIAN CRISIS IN INDIA

THE AGRARIAN CRISIS IN INDIA

Twenty first century India has emerged as a major economic power in the world, with thegrowth rate of the gross domestic product reaching impressive levels and the poverty ratiocoming down significantly. In the context of such a scenario, it is indeed very incongruous

and difficult to believe that the Indian countryside where the large majority of its peoplereside is in the grip of a severe agrarian crisis. In the opinion of Prabhat Patnaik, this crisis inIndian agriculture is unparalleled since independence and reminiscent only of the agrarian

crisis of pre-war and war days .According to Sahai, the most tragic face of India’s agrarian crisis is seen in the increasingnumber of farmer suicides, not just in the hotspot areas of Andhra Pradesh and Vidarbhabutin the allegedly prosperous agricultural zones of Punjab and Karnataka as well. Farmers’suicides are no longer limited to the drought and poverty stricken areas of the country.

Farmers in the most productive agricultural regions such as Karnataka, Punjab, West Bengal,Andhra Pradesh, and Maharastra are ending their lives because of their massive indebtedness.Mishra also expresses a similar view when he says that the conventional notion of agrarian distress being part of the broader landscape of underdeveloped agriculture and backwardness

no longer fits to the emerging evidences from rural India. Manifestations of agrarian distress in contemporary India is not confined to the pockets of backwardness; even the regions

having a high degree of commercial agriculture, using relatively better technology and having a relatively diversified cropping pattern have reported high indebtedness and distress of

various kinds. More than six thousand indebted farmers, mainly cotton farmers, have committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh alone during the period from 1998 to 2005 as its government which had entered into a state-level Structural Adjustment Programme with the World Bank, raised power tariff five times even as cotton price fell by half. In Maharashtra, 644 farmers committed suicide across three of its six regions between January 2001 and December 2004.

In Karnataka, 49 suicidal deaths occurred between April and October 2003 in the droughtproneregion of Hassan. Over the same period of time, 22 suicides occurred in Mandya, the state’s ‘sugar bowl’; 18 occurred in Shimoga, a heavy rainfall district, and 14 occurred in Heveri, a district that receives average rainfall, owing to indebtedness to private

moneylenders. While statistics may show Punjab to be India’s ‘breadbasket,’ claiming that its soils are rich and its five rivers supply abundant water throughout the state, the reality of this

image of prosperity is revealed by the increasing number of suicidal deaths among Punjabi farmers. Over a thousand farmer suicides have also taken place in Punjab mainly in the cotton

belt. In the four years from 2001, over 1,250 suicides took place in Wynaad in Kerala. In Burdwan, the region of West Bengal commonly called the “rice bowl of the East,” 1,000 farmers ended their lives in 2003. Kidney sales and nine thousand suicides (between 1998-2005), according to Utsa Patnaik,4 are only the tip of the iceberg of increasing deprivation. A crucial index of this deprivation is an astonishing fall in food grains absorption to levels prevalent 50 years ago, and decline in average calorie intake in rural India. Availability or absorption of foodgrains is calculated on the annual net output adjusted only for change in public stocks and in trade. It covers all final uses – direct use for consumption as grain and its products, use as feed for converting to animal products (a part of this is exported), and industrial use. The per capita availability or absorption of food grains in India has descended to a mere 155 kg annually taking the three

year average ending in 2002-03. This level is the same as fifty years ago during the First Planperiod, and it is also the level seen during 1937-41 under colonialism.