The Secret Suicide Pact

Vidarbha claims an occasional burst of attention, but unknown to most, Chhattisgarh has become India’s largest farmer graveyard, writes SHRIYA MOHAN

Loss beyond words Hemram Yadav’s children refuse to reveal why their father killed himself in 2006 PHOTOS: VIJAY PANDEY

CHHATTISGARH HAS for long been in the national eye for its Naxal threat. But few know of its other grave crisis that has been kept carefully under wraps – that its farmers have been silently killing themselves for nearly a decade now. Five states — Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh — account for just a third of the country’s population but twothirds of the India’s farmers’ suicides. The number of farmers who have committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2007 now stands at a staggering 1,82,936 according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a wing of the Union home ministry. When Chhattisgarh became an independent state in 2001, for the first time NCRB compiled data for it separately, recording an alarming 1,452 farmer suicides in the state in that year. For every one lakh people, seven farmers killed themselves. In comparison, Maharashtra saw four farmer suicides for every one lakh of its population in the same year. To offer an even better comparison, take Maharashtra’s farmer suicide capital, Vidarbha, with 1.5 lakh fewer people and roughly the size of Chhattisgarh. While Vidarbha saw the most farmer suicides in 2006, with 1,065 farmers killing themselves, Chhattisgarh saw 1,483 the same year and 1,593 the next year. Yet, while Vidarbha’s suicides made national headlines, Chhattisgarh is in denial till date.

If you calculate farmer suicides as a percentage of the total population of a state, Chhattisgarh has ranked the highest in the country for six years in a row. But what hits home the hardest is that while India’s national average for farmer suicides is 14 per one lakh people, Chhattisgarh’s Mahasamund district alone is a staggering 83!

When TEHELKA traveled to the suicide- hit areas in Chhattisgarh’s Mahasamund district, it was puzzling to find that the families listed in NCRB’s data were not willing to disclose any information about their deceased family members. In Ghodari Village, Mahasamund, Santosh Nishad’s house is dark and empty, but for his father, Bahadur Singh, who is partially paralysed. Nishad’s wife is a daily wage labourer and was yet to return from work. His three children have all dropped out of school to work as wage labourers to keep themselves alive. It’s been a year since Nishad was found sprawled near his field, an empty bottle of insecticide by his side.

“Please leave us alone and don’t ask me about my dead son. I don’t know why he died. How can I say what was in his head?” comes an automatic reaction as Bahadur Singh sees us. The anger is sharp, but justified. “We haven’t gotten any relief from the government. We don’t have a ration card or Below Poverty Line (BPL) card and are struggling to buy food grains from the market to feed our hungry stomachs. Why should I speak to you when nothing here changes for us?” he says. Five years ago, Santosh sold most of his land bit by bit for his father’s medical treatment and today his family is left with just half an acre. According to his family, he was in no debt. But neighbours say his crops failed around the time he died. The reason for Santosh’s death, like most others, is listed in police records as ‘Economic difficulty’. Is this a farmer suicide then?

P. Sainath, award-winning development journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, says “Several factors get discounted while tabulating farmer suicides. For instance, women farmers are considered just ‘farmers’ wives’ (by custom, land is almost never in their names). This classification enables governments to exclude countless women farmer suicides.” Other categories commonly excluded from the calculations are those farmers owning land in a family member’s name and those who farm on leased land. All these factors make the numbers reflect only a small ratio of the actual numbers.

According to Sanket Thakur, an agricultural scientist in Chhattisgarh, the core problems of Chhattisgarh is irrigation. Paddy, the main crop, needs a fair amount of water and only a fourth of agricultural land is irrigated. 75 per cent of farmers are small and marginal ones who own less than five acres of land. The uneven rainfall and the unaffordability of irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides combine to make many farmers unable to sustain themselves agriculturally. “They consider poor productivity their destiny,” says Thakur, explaining that six quintals of rice per acre is considered normal in Chhattisgarh, when states like Punjab grow four times that on a regular basis.

WHEN THE SP of Mahasamund, Anand Chabre was asked to comment on the issue, he said, “I haven’t heard of farmer suicides in this area. There might be suicides, but not specific to farmers.” DN Tewari, the Vice Chairman, State Planning Commission, Chhattisgarh is furious. “Why would a farmer here commit suicide? Chhattisgarh produces a surplus of everything. Not a single farmer is in debt!” he says. When quizzed about the NCRB data, Tewari says, “Probably the NCRB has taken the information from some unreliable source. I even wrote a letter to them asking them to revisit us and look at the situation in a new light. I told them, ‘When we are supplying rice and pulses to the world, why would people here be committing suicide?’”

So what then explains the horrific figures? Visiting a few more families on the list gave similar responses to Nishad’s. So TEHELKA decided to explore and understand an average farmer’s life in Mahasamund. Shatruhan, a 40-year-old farmer lives with his wife and five children in Baaghbara. Shatruhan had sowed paddy and pulses (urad dal) in the seven acres of land he had. When one of his daughters was to be married last year, he sold three acres of his pulse fields for Rs 2.5 lakhs. “The dal we grew was only for our consumption. There was nothing left to sell. Now, we don’t eat dal anymore because we can’t afford to buy it in the market,” says Shatruhan. Shatruhan’s story resonates with other food-producing farmers who suffer major nutritional losses when they sell their land. Shatruhan has four more children to be married off. What happens after he sells all his land?

Next door, Bhagirath, a daily wage labourer has just taken a Rs 50,000 loan to get his daughter married. Landless for generations, Bhagirath’s family members work for Rs 40 a day, ploughing fields or working on construction sites in nearby areas. Every year, he cultivates paddy on two acres of leased land. The landowner extracts eight quintals of the produce as fee for the leased land, leaving barely four quintals for Bhagirath to feed his family of six for a few months. And if the weather gods decide to toy with his fate, farmers like Bhagirath often become indebted to the landowner and have to pay their cumulative debts in either cash or grains over the following years. Bhagirath’s total family income in a year amounts to a little under Rs 30,000. “No one lends Rs 50,000 in a lump sum because I have no collateral, so I borrow small amounts from several money lenders at an interest of 5 percent per month,” he says seriously.

FOR A MOMENT you don’t know how to react. That is an interest of 60 per cent per annum! For every year he takes to pay his loan, the interest alone is Rs 30,000 — what his family earns in an entire year. It doesn’t take much to realise he can never pull himself out of debt. The next year he will be trying to find a whole new set of moneylenders to repay his loans. But how far can he run? Bhagirath and Shatruhan display the spectrum of Chhattisgarh’s farmers – the land owner who is selling his only asset to sustain himself, and the landless farmer, who is debt- ridden and crumbling under pressure.

If thousands of farmers in Chhattisgarh are committing suicide every year, how come no one is talking about it? Shubhranshu Choudhary, a freelance journalist writing actively on the issue says, “As Chhattisgarh’s local media cannot do without revenue from government advertisements, journalists are discouraged from taking positions critical of the state. The hopelessness of the situation also can be seen by the lack of farmers’ movements, unlike Vidarbha’s shetkari sanghatans, which have active farmer leaders.” The NCRB is a month away from releasing its 2008 figures of farmer suicides, which, experts say, will keep rising if the state refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis.

Bob Dylan once sang, “How many deaths does it take to be known that too many people have died?” An apt question for Chhattisgarh.

(With inputs from Shubhranshu Choudhary)

WRITER’S EMAIL
shriya@tehelka.com