By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
India, it seems, has evolved a new yardstick for development. More the farmers’ suicide more ‘developed’ the country or state is. This is not figment of imagination of any prophet of doom, but the impression one gets after going through the figures provided by none else but the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Sharad Pawar, in Rajya Sabha on May 7.
As per his statement 3,450 farmers committed suicide in three years of 2007, 2008 and 2009. Maharashtra, considered as the most developed state in the country and also Pawar’s home state topped the list with 1,720 farmers committing suicide between 2007 and 2009.
If Maharashtra boasts of having Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have two of our most advanced cyber-cities, the main attraction of all the MNCs and corporate bigwigs.
But the presence of Hyderabad and Bangalore respectively did not prevent Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka from occupying the second and third position in the country. They witnessed 1,142 and 434 farmers’ suicide respectively during this period. All these are sacrosanct official figure.
The unofficial version may be much higher. For example, Vidharba region of Maharashtra alone witnessed 250 farmers’ suicide in the last four months. This figure was provided by none else but P Sainath, the renowned authority on the subject. He wrote in the Hindu (May 6, 2010) that before taking their lives some of these farmers have addressed suicide notes to the Prime Minister, Chief Minister or Finance Minister. Sainath, the author of Everyone Loves A Good Drought, while writing from the region, said that three farmers committed suicide in less than a month in Dhotragaon village in Washim district alone.
The official figures only talk about farmers’ suicide, most of them engaged in the cash crop growing area and are neck deep in debt. No mention has been made of starvation death in this period. The figure may be much higher.
But the figure of 3,450 suicide in three years is much less than the earlier data, which said that between 1997 and 2005 officially 136,324 farmers committed ‘distress suicide’. This figure was also given in Parliament five years back. It goes to suggest that over 15,000 farmers had been committing suicide every year then. The rate of suicide during that period was much higher than now––obviously because the growth rate too was higher, between nine and 10 per cent (as claimed by the then Vajpayee government). Now that the growth rate has declined slightly so has the farmers’ suicide rate.
After the three developed states, now take the example of Bihar, arguably the most backward state of the country. For all its fault the 15 years of Lalu-Rabri rule hardly witnessed any suicide by farmers, nor could the hostile media find any report of starvation death then. That was the period when Andhra Pradesh under Chandrababu Naidu was registering highest number of farmers’ suicide––as well as growth rate too. It was followed by Karnataka and Maharashtra.
But now that Bihar under Nitish Kumar has become ‘developed’––at least in the eyes of media––it witnessed about 200 starvation death in the last couple of years. The figure was once again not given by any opposition leader, but by Harsh Mandar (IAS), the Right to Food Commissioner appointed by none else but the Supreme Court of India.
The question is why Bihar, which became self-sufficient in foodgrains production in late 1990s, saw so many starvation deaths? Only in March a farmer of Purnea district, Jagdish Sharma, committed suicide by taking pesticide when he saw that maize crop grown by him do not have kernel. The newspapers did carry the report quoting the widow of Sharma.
However, a few days later the Superintendent of Police of the district denied the report––in fact he was asked by the state government to do so. He said that Sharma inhaled pesticide while spraying it and that he had not committed suicide. But the state government had no answer to the news that a farmer-couple of neighbouring Katihar district also took pesticide only to be rushed to the hospital. The reason was the same.
Another so-called success story is of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. The media applauded him for his state’s 11.4 per cent growth rate. But the journalists deliberately ignored one important fact. Modi’s state registered 11.4 per cent growth when the country was registering the growth of nine to 10 per cent. Two decades back Gujarat had the growth rate of 12-13 per cent when the national growth rate was something between six and seven per cent.
Yet media never highlighted that Gujarat under Modi has actually declined. The media-corporate lobby wants to project Modi as the developmental minded chief minister because they want to white-wash his crime committed in 2002. It is a very subtle way of defending the criminal. Mind it, Gujarat may be industrially a developed state––it has been so since late 19th century as it has large coast-line and attracted a lot of European entrepreneurs––but today it is fifth in the hunger index of the country. But the Indian media do not highlight this aspect as hunger, suicide and starvation death make bad news for our rich and powerful. So keep manufacturing fantastic stories of growth rate.