Farmers' suicides in India
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India is an agrarian country with around 60% of its people depending directly or indirectly upon agriculture. Agriculture in India is often attributed asgambling with monsoons because of its almost exclusive dependency on precipitation from monsoons. The failure of these monsoons can lead to a series of droughts, lack of better prices, and exploitation of the farmers by middlemen, all of which have led to a series of suicides committed by farmers across India.[1] * |
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Statistics [edit]
Farmers in India became the centre of considerable concern in the 1990s when the journalist P Sainath highlighted the large number of suicides among them. Official reports initially denied the farmer suicides but as more and more information came to light the government began to accept that farmers in India were under considerable stress. On figures there was much debate since the issue was so emotive. More than 17,500 farmers a year killed themselves between 2002 and 2006, according to experts who have analyzed government statistics.[2] Others traced the increase in farmer suicides to the early 1990s.[3][4] It was said, a comprehensive all-India study is still awaited, that most suicides occurred in states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra,Karnataka, Kerala and Punjab.[5][6][7][8][9] The situation was grim enough to force at least the Maharashtra government to set up a dedicated office to deal with farmers distress.[10]
In 2006, the state of Maharashtra, with 4,453 farmers’ suicides accounted for over a quarter of the all-India total of 17,060, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). NCRB also stated that there were at least 16,196 farmers' suicides in India in 2008, bringing the total since 1997 to 199,132 .[11]According to another study by the Bureau, while the number of farm suicides increased