Plight of the Indian Farmer
India is an agrarian country and around 60% of its people directly or indirectly depend upon agriculture. Agriculture in India is often attributed as gambling 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.
Things have always been bleak for the Indian farmer. Here the term ‘farmer’ is used to describe the agriculturists with very small land holdings or no land ownership at all. The policies of the government and the often-lackadaisical attitude of the bureaucracy are responsible for the sorry plight of the farmer.
Even the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ was successful only in patches. Not many small farmers could reap the benefits of the technology that required large tracts of land and lot of money. The policy makers ignored the need for creating infrastructural facilities like irrigation and storage and not to mention the transport facilities.
Some of the main causes of the farmers’ mass suicide is due to absence of adequate social support infrastructure at the level of the village and district, uncertainty of agricultural enterprise in India, indebtedness of farmers, rising costs of cultivation, plummeting prices of farm commodities, lack of credit for small farmers, relative absence of irrigation facilities, repeated crop failures.
India is transforming rapidly into a primarily urban, industrial society with industry as its main source of income; which is why the government and society remains unconcerned about the condition of the countryside. Moreover, a downturn in the urban economy pushes a large number of distressed non-farmers to try their hand at cultivation; in the absence of any responsible counseling either