Indian Farmers Commit Suicide?
Since 2001, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every half hour. Is climate change to blame?Like most modernizing countries, India has seen a decline in the number of individuals who engage in agriculture for a living.
In the decade between 2001 and 2011, for example, the government estimates the number of Indian farmers declined by 9 million people, which marks the first absolute decline in this segment of the population since 1971. As a percentage of the total populace, farmers declined by 7 percent during the last decade, and they now constitute less than a quarter of India’s population.
These numbers, in and of themselves, don’t necessarily constitute a bad trend. After all, a decline in the agrarian population could be a sign of increased productivity, or simply greater opportunities in the urban population.
Yet one harrowing sign of the state of Indian farmers is the suicide rate.
For decades Indian farmers have been committing suicide at alarming rates that are well above the rates of the population at large, which itself has been rising. Moreover, the problem does not appear to be getting any better; in fact, it is if anything worsening, despite the state’s efforts to address the problem.
One of the more authoritative studies on the subject, “Farmers' Suicides in India: Magnitudes, Trends and Spatial Patterns”, examined farmer suicides in India between the years of 1997 and 2006. According to that study, “Going by the official data, on average nearly 16,000 farmers committed suicide every year over the last decade or so. It is also clear from the table that every seventh suicide in the country was a farm suicide.”
This was, the study’s author noted, if anything a drastic underestimation of the problem. That is because, according to the author, many police officers only counted someone who had committed suicide as a farmer if they owned the title to their land, which an increasing number of Indian farmers do not. Additionally, as in many cultures, many parts of India consider suicide taboo and therefore family members are likely to report the cause of death as something else.
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