Manoj's World

Heartbreaking as they are, suicides - over 90 last month - are only a symptom of the larger and deep agrarian crisis, reminds the award-winning journalist, touching on the role played by our policy-makers and politicians - from Montek Singh Ahluwalia to Sharad Pawar and Vilasrao Deshmukh, among many others.

SMRUTI KOPPIKAR interviews P. Sainath

Farmers’ suicides in remote parts of the country have a way of appearing in and disappearing from our national media and national consciousness. With suicides, mainly by cotton farmers in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, hitting an all-time high of over 710 since June last year, the political establishment was forced to take some note. The Prime Minister himself called a meeting in June and asked to visit the six affected districts of Vidarbha. He traveled there on June 30 and July 1 when the suicide tally read 574; since his visit and announcement of a Rs 3750 crore relief package, over 90 suicides have been reported in a single month.

As cold statistics keep piling up – Vidarbha follows a pattern seen in Andhra Pradhesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab – and the national media chooses an occasional fleeting moment to throw its spotlight on the crisis, there is one man who has been consistently highlighting the heart-breaking grimness of the issues involved: award-winning journalist-author P. Sainath who has been tracking "the suicide story" for over six years now. Sainath, who works as Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu is based in Mumbai but has reported on rural distress and agrarian crisis since 1993-94 in various publications. He has traveled thousands of kilometers across states for research and reporting on these issues and spent considerable time in the districts of Anantapur, Mahbubnagar, Nalgonda, Medak, Nizamabad, Adilabad, Ranga Reddy in Andhra Pradesh; mainly Wayanad district in Kerala; Yavatmal, Amravati, Akola, Buldhana, Wardha in Maharashtra; as also parts of western Orissa and Rajasthan.

For his work on rural distress including farmers’ suicides, Sainath has received highly prestigious national and international awards including the United Nations FAO Boerma Prize and the Harry Chapin award earlier this year. Not surprisingly, the award money has been ploughed back in various ways to alleviate some part of the suffering of the scores of distressed families he has written about; it’s a little-known facet of his work. "The level of distress in rural households is nearly the same everywhere," he says, "the only difference between a suicide and non-suicide household is the loss of the breadwinner. We are not even beginning to address the distress." No wonder then that, given his research and datasheets of the last many years, the Prime Minister asked for an exclusive one-on-one briefing in June 22nd evening at the PM’s Race Course Road residence, where his Vidarbha visit took shape. Sainath was realistic enough to know that the relief package announced on July 1 would not make a major difference to the lives or futures of the indebted farmers, but even he is now distressed by the unstoppable tally of suicides.

Here, Sainath talks to Smruti Koppikar, Outlook Bureau Chief in Mumbai, on a gamut of issues from suicides to agrarian crisis and gradual corporatisation of Indian agriculture.

Smruti Kopikar: It’s been over a month since the PM visited Vidarbha. This period saw an unprecedented level of farmers’ suicides: nearly 90 in July alone. Obviously, the PM’s relief package did not mean much. What is your interpretation of the spate of suicides?

P. Sainath: Whatever the rhetoric at the top, nothing has really changed on the ground. To begin with, by the time the PM came, the sowing season had ended and there was an absolute lack of credit. It’s one thing for the farmer if he has sown but it turns out to be a bad crop and so on, but to not sow at all means an abject and utter sense of failure and defeat for him. This year many farmers just couldn’t sow; they were indebted many times over. Then, there’s the whole sense of being let down because there was such a huge expectancy build-up to the visit.

Farmers really believed that the PM would do for them what their own chief minister and (union) agriculture minister have not done in the last few years, but there was little to cheer in the PM’s package. Forget the package, no one can tell what happened to the Rs 50 lakh that the PM left behind for each of the six districts; at least that could have been put to immediate use but clearly wasn’t. We can only hope that the numbers will now taper off.

The agriculture ministry seems to have played a significant role in the non-implementation of the PM package, isn’t it? That the minister allowed the crisis to reach such proportions is itself an indictment but his role in the last month has been less than exemplary, would you say?

Mr Sharad Pawar, it seems, is the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI) chief first and union agriculture minister later. At least that’s what a dinner invitation to honour him recently in Chennai wanted us to believe. He apparently had no objection to being introduced in this manner, so the BCCI chief is clearly the more ascendant part of his function. In any case, cricket is more profitable than subsistence level agriculture. But, there are other ways in which he is undermining the debate altogether. A cabinet colleague of his mentioned sometime back that there were decisions that could not be taken because the agriculture minister was not present. Mr Pawar has missed cabinet meetings on agricultural issues at a time when farm sector crisis was that big but he did make the time to attend meetings on cricket at Doha and Qatar and elsewhere.

Beyond all this, what’s disturbing is the insidious ways in which his "ministry" - who in the ministry is what I would like to know - is consistently undermining the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers (NCF) and the political games he’s playing in Vidarbha. For example, the NCF suggested long back that import duty on cotton should be raised. It wouldn’t -- or shouldn’t -- cost the government anything, yet the agriculture minister is unwilling to increase it to any level from the current 10 per cent. He seems loathe to bring in a Price Stabilisation Fund for cotton, the way we have for oil, that was also suggested by the NCF. And, it’s open knowledge that he opposed tooth-and-nail the idea of a loan waiver for indebted cotton farmers though he never opposes subsidies for sugarcane farmers and now for wine growers. What’s mischievous is that his "ministry" issues statements to certain publications on how "unpracticable" NCF recommendations are, trying to put a question mark on NCF’s credibility. Who in the ministry is saying this, he himself? Please explain to us why the recommendations are "unpracticable".

You have toured Vidarbha extensively in the last two years. Before that, you wrote about farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh, in Kerala. What’s it that’s gone so horribly wrong in Vidarbha that the Maharashtra government hasn’t been able to address when you compare this region to other suicide-affected regions?

It’s a very frightening situation. Vidarbha is defying the trend that we have seen in the last few years when there were spurts of suicides in certain seasons. You could clearly see the spikes in Feb-March, then April-May when farmers go to purchase inputs for the sowing season ahead. Monsoons have always been bad for suicides but this year’s Vidarbha is the worst-ever. The spraying season is also bad because that’s when the burdened indebted farmer also has a can of pesticide in his hands…years of frustration and humiliation could just end in a moment. So many deaths have happened in the fields like this.

At the government level, I must say the Vilasrao Deshmukh government has been totally pathetic.

Chief minister Deshmukh and union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar who is from the state had not even visited a single suicide-affected family or village till they were forced to accompany the PM in late June. That itself shows how serious the state government and state leaders perceived the situation to be, and it wasn’t as if there were no reports. The media was writing about it, local politicians were bringing it up, sections of the bureaucracy knew what was happening. There was simply no response. Rather, the response was contrary to what it should have been.

Take the minimum support price (MSP). This Congress-NCP came to power in October 2004 on the promise that it would restore the MSP to Rs 2700 per quintal, that’s what they said when Madam Gandhi canvassed there for votes. Then, within a year, the government drops the MSP to Rs 1700 per quintal. Just restoring it to the pre-2005 level would have saved lives this year. Then, they withdrew the advance bonus of Rs 500 per quintal which would have cost the government Rs 1100 crore a year. It’s purely ideological decision but the farmers are paying with their lives for it. After all this, the chief minister keeps saying suicides have nothing to do with prices.

The state government has been in the denial mode.

Of course. The first instance was in the way they kept fudging suicide figures. Initially, government officials told the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) that only 141 farmers had committed suicide between 2001 and 2004, then they told the Bombay High Court that 524 had committed suicide in the four-year period, in October 2005 they told the NCF that the figure was 309 only for Yavatmal. Two months later, the government told the state assembly that 1041 farmer suicides had been recorded in the period. Then, of course, the PM was given a figure of 1600 plus in six districts, of which 574 had been recorded in the last one year, prior to his visit. So, there’s a basic attitude of denial.

That’s topped by a laggard and lackadaisical approach to the situation. I will give you just two instances. When the NCF was on its mission to Vidarbha, not a single MLA from the region came to meet the team or talk or be present anywhere, which was in complete contrast to Kerala when three MLAs from Wayanad region talked to the NCF team. Then, of course, Mr Pawar visited Vidarbha two days before the NCF came there but he had apparently come there to canvas votes from the Vidarbha Cricket Association for BCCI election. He even addressed a press conference but he had no time for dying farmers.

Mr Vasant Purke is the guardian minister, he never visited a single affected village. When he eventually did, it was to a village that he didn’t even know existed, people there gave him a piece of their mind. All that the government has done is to stonewall and remain silent. When the numbers piled up and the crisis became too big to keep quiet, they started instituting teams and commissions of inquiry. Each one came up with similar findings but they still instituted the next, hoping that that report will be in their favour. There’s also a collapse of sorts of the local political class.

So Mr Vilasrao Deshmukh is twiddling his thumbs but he and the union agriculture minister don’t seem to be on the same page on this issue. Also the one-upmanship between Congress and NCP is playing itself out here too. Is this your assessment as well?

There’s a larger political game at play. Mr Sharad Pawar wants to be seen as the benefactor of whatever little happens in the farmers’ favour there, so he pouted and played hard to get when the PM’s visit was announced. He wanted the relief package to be seen as his doing for the Maharashtra farmer.

And the PM was supposed to be a postman delivering it there! Unfortunately for him, it didn’t work out that way. If the state government does anything for the farmers, it will be seen as the Congress’ gesture which does not bode well for NCP prospects there in the next election. So, there is indeed a political game being played out there but that’s not what we need to spotlight; doing that would take away from the focus on the crisis. There are other aspects of politics too - local leaders, MLAs and others are becoming agents of seed companies, they are the new moneylenders, and so on. Politicians are very much a part of the problem.

You have tracked the farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh extensively. Tell us the difference in the way the governments in Hyderabad and Mumbai handled the crisis in the two states.

Oh, there’s a big difference, especially in the last two years. And, they are both Congress party governments, at least Congress-led governments. The crisis there happened or peaked when TDP and Chandrababu Naidu were at the helm. After their 2004 defeat, Naidu, who was hailed as the best reformist chief minister of the country by international lending institutions, told the world that the TDP had failed to make farming community accept the correctness of the reforms but told his party: we lost farmers. If the Congress was back in power, there was a message for it and they seemed to have got at least some things right. Andhra Pradesh is a poorer state than Maharashtra, its Human Development Index is the worst for the four southern states.

In the two years of YSR Reddy’s tenure as chief minister, several pro-active steps have been taken. First, they paid compensation to almost 3000 farmers which was a big step because this was an acknowledgement of the crisis at a time when the Naidu government was not even willing to say so. The actual figures of those who should have got compensation were higher, but at least these suicides were not disputed. Then, they set up a helpline for farmers and saw to it that calls were taken seriously. Then, they issued ten lakh new Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards and restored the ones that the Naidu government had cancelled. This meant that indebted and impoverished families had some access to foodgrain.

What worked also was that AP agriculture minister has been pro-active on the issues that were in his domain. He was the man who took the multinational seed company Monsanto to court over the exorbitant rates they were charging for seeds, under the guise of technology costs. See what happened. Monsanto dropped its price per packet of Bt cotton seed by half. It was a big relief. The government banned three varieties of seeds. Then, he led raids on moneylenders who were harassing farmers and forced them into an one-time settlement against outstanding loans. There were, and are, issues that are outside the purview of the state government like the import duty and so on but at least, the government was seen to be doing something that touched the farmers’ lives in a real way. It restored the confidence of the peasant community. The first few months of Congress rule may have seen high suicide figures continuing from TDP time, but the numbers tapered off. What’s surprising is that both AP and Maharashtra have Congress-led governments and yet there are such deep differences in their approach.

Over the years, what are your impressions of how the crisis has played out? Are there any trends that are common, any lessons that can be learned and transferred?

There are some trends and patterns that are common.

One is that you learn to anticipate the season of suicides and hope that there are none. The sowing season is one when credit becomes unavailable or too expensive to the farmer and he sees no further hope. Then, the harvest season when his produce - the little that has survived drought, pestilence and everything else - gets a low output price which is so low that it often doesn’t even cover the cost. So, what’s left for the farmer and his family? The lender claims the first right on the produce. The state-owned marketing agencies and representatives are not to be seen or pay the farmer very little. So, there are seasons of suicides that people like us hope not to see, but know will come upon us.

There’s another frightening trend in Vidarbha that I also noticed in Kerala - so many farmers who committed suicide were experienced farmers, who had been at it for years together yet saw no light at the end of the tunnel. They were not novices but had at least 15-20 years of experience of withstanding drought, inhospitable conditions. Many of them had a good elementary education, they had passed Class Xth at least. It’s scary when a farmer like this with 20 years of experience behind him says: "I am gone, I can’t do it anymore". It shows how we as a nation treat our farming community.

There’s a pattern in the government’s response too. State governments in each of these states and the central government begin in the denial mode. The union agriculture minister dismisses these suicides as a mere 15 per cent of the one lakh suicides in the country every year. This attitude then inhibits everything else, all other responses. Once the issue becomes too hot to handle, governments get into the dispute mode. They dispute your figures, they institute committees and commissions they hope will give them more good-looking figures but it doesn’t always happen that way. So, they will keep disputing all other sets of figures but never actually giving their set of numbers. Then, there’s a whole Brahminical analysis of election results and suchlike to show that there’s no relation of the crisis to political power.

The most "successful" strategy so far for them has been to treat farmers’ suicides as separate from the larger agrarian crisis, distinct from rural distress. Bad monsoon or drought is a favourite fallback excuse for suicides but we have had ten-twelve good monsoons now, so that falls flat. Once governments acknowledge the crisis, their response is very varied depending on who runs the show, who calls the shots, who is tied in with what interests and so on. Most responses are then ideologically determined - for example, Kerala demanded many concessions and got some because all their crops were linked to global trade, AP does it one way, Punjab yet another (there hasn’t been much media attention on Punjab though the crisis is as big), Maharashtra another way.

Farmers taking their lives, however heart-rending, are the micro stories. The larger issue is why so many thousands of them have been pushed to such an extreme step, isn’t it?

Every suicide is heart-breaking. The delayed and little media attention is focused on the suicides, so are many responses. Suicides have to be recorded but they are not the crises. Suicides are a symptom of the larger and deep agrarian crisis that we as a nation find ourselves in. Governments are still quibbling over the reasons for suicides and setting up committees to find out those reasons but truth is that we all know the reasons. Vidarbha is not unique, nor is any other region. They are part of the larger crisis. And the crisis is there to see, it is affecting every farm household. The only difference between a suicide and non-suicide household is the loss of the breadwinner but they are faced with the same set of issues.

Every suicide has a multiplicity of causes, the farmer has been harassed for years in a row, finds himself in a debt trap where he has to take private credit to pay off earlier credit, he is not eligible for fresh bank credit because banks term him a defaulter, he owes money to the moneylender, the seed agent, the pesticide agent, a string of local sahukars from whom he has taken money for medical emergencies or weddings and so on. In such circumstances, any trigger is enough to take the extreme last step: it could a be fight with his wife, or it could be another insult from the moneylender or someone forcibly taking over his land/house for defaulting. What’s completely appalling is that local officials record various silly reasons for suicides and the family doesn’t become eligible for state compensation, if and when it’s given. In Vidarbha, officials who had made excuses for not giving compensation last many months were running around on the eve of PM’s visit to hand over the cheques, without any verification.

There simply hasn’t been enough debate about or focus on the larger agrarian crisis. Is it that governments don’t get the picture? Why do governments seems to blindfold themselves?

The way I see it, there are primarily ideological issues involved here. I believe that eventually, in one way or the other, the outstanding debt will have to be waived off. There’s no hope in hell that it can ever be recovered. Farmers are just not able to pay off, what can they do? In the current agrarian set-up, at least for cotton, input prices are high and output is priced lower, government support price is pulled off or lowered, foreign cotton is cheaper because of low import duties. How in the world can this system be favourable or beneficial to the farmers? Is it so difficult for those in power to understand this? No, but there are ideological issues involved here. For a certain type of politician and bureaucrat, loan waiver is a dirty word and they will not even consider it. The same set will happily write off lakhs of crores of industrial loans as bad debt or non-performing assets (NPAs).

There are other issues as well. Look at the gigantic cuts in our Rural Development expenditure. In 1989, it was 14.5 per cent of our GDP. It had sunk to 5.9 per cent of the GDP by 2004. In real terms, it represents a fall of about Rs 30,000 crore a year in rural expenditure, economist Utsa Patnaik has worked out. The income loss in villages is between Rs 1,20,000 to 1,50,000 crore over these years. We may as well have sent the Air Force to bomb the countryside! It’s like taking Rs 2000 crore out of Mumbai and wondering where we have gone wrong.

Then, there’s the so-called market-based pricing. We all know how Monsanto made easy money on royalty and technology costs while the Indian farmer was killing himself over the high seed prices. The local seeds were Rs 7 a kilo in 1991, the commercial varieties cost Rs 80-100 per kilo even ten years back. Monsanto seeds cost nearly Rs 3800 a kilo, now they cost about half. Similarly, all input prices were allowed to explode…a DAP bag cost Rs 100 in 1991, it now costs between Rs 480 and Rs 500. Water and electricity costs exploded. Farmers were told that Bt seed would not attract bollworm and they would save on pesticides, but in reality they had to buy pesticides even for the Bt seed and these pesticides cost more than the usual varieties they had used. Then, governments go around depressing output prices and withdrawing advance bonus. How can a farmer sustain in such an unproductive pattern, year after year?

There’s the issue of farm credit as well. Either it’s not available or it’s very expensive.

This is possibly the worst part of the link that leads to suicides.

In the era of reforms, bank credit to agriculture has declined. The number of banks in rural areas has declined sharply, both in absolute terms and percentage terms. The NSS 59th round showed the pattern of indebtedness amongst rural households. It more than doubled between 1991-92 and 2003-03, from 21 per cent to 48 per cent. It has since only become worse. If you take a map of rural indebtedness and a map of farmer suicides, they fit like a T. That should tell the entire story, to whoever wants to listen. Where farmers have high debt but are supported by a relatively better welfare/support network like in Tamilnadu, the incidence of suicides is lower. TN has also given a total loan waiver. I don’t understand what’s stopping Maharashtra from doing it.

Then, there’s the new emerging sahukar in these villages. He used to be the agricultural extension officer, now he’s the technical expert, he’s a lender, also doubles up as agent for seed companies like Monsanto or pesticide companies. He makes money in three ways - he sells seeds and pesticides at higher rates, he charges an usurious two and a half per cent per hundred or 30 per cent per annum on credit extended to the farmer, he also claims the first right on produce and gives low prices to the farmer but sells at higher prices in the market. Yavatmal district had about 100 seeds shops, now there are 1200 of them. Agricultural extension concept is dead, the entire machinery had just broken down. To top it all, the output prices have simply collapsed for farmers though agents are making money. Farming has become unviable and that’s the larger issue. Successive government policies have made it so. Today, in Warangal in AP, a farmer with eight acres of paddy and family of five would be officially under the BPL. That’s how bad we have made it for them.

Then, there’s the international institutional arrangements our governments have entered into. International prices are volatile. While the US protects its 20,000 cotton growers (growers because they are not just farmers, they are also large companies) with subsidies of $4.7 billion in 2004-05, our governments take away support prices and bonuses. The value of crop that year in the US was $3.9 billion. The subsidies meant cheaper cotton in the international market; it destroyed cotton farmers from Vidarbha to West Africa. The subsidy for a European cow is now more than that given to an Indian farmer! And, let’s not forget that the Indian farmer is operating in a rigged market, rigged by the middlemen here and by the large corporates in the world. As many as 85 per cent of our farmers are now net purchasers. Government policies are clearly taking us toward corporatisation of agriculture, taking farming out of the farmers’ hands and handing it over to national or preferably international corporates.

Obviously those who are re-defining our agriculture know what they are doing and where it will lead us as a nation. Yet, they are doing it. It’s not that farmers or people in that arena are taking everything lying down, we see a lot of anger. Why isn’t that forcing a re-think by governments?

Yes, there’s a lot of anger and there’s activism too. We have a situation where people are telling the government, or anyone in authority willing to listen, what’s going wrong. Some are resorting to extreme measures - like when the Shiv Sena MLA Gulabrao Gawande set himself on fire in the well of the Maharashtra state legislature last December, or now when vigilante justice is taking root in some villages where angry farmers have killed moneylenders or activists have forcibly taken back land from lenders. So, the writing is clearly on the wall. Those who should read it are busy doing other things, it seems.

Look at rural employment data, it tells the same story.

The growth in rural employment in agriculture in late 90s is the lowest-ever - 0.67 per cent. Employment in non-farm sector has also stagnated. The National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) was an effort but the government isn’t putting enough money into it. So far, I believe 26.6 million have applied for work - what does that say? In AP, 27 lakh have applied, in Maharashtra eight lakh have done so in the first week alone. And, there are farmers in this list with six acres of land to their name! NREG is supposed to give Rs 60 a day; moong dal costs Rs 62 a kilo in the open market. And, then the growth rate of food production and output is less now than the growth rate of population. We are staring at food grain imports. Obviously, there will be migration to the cities where these people are seen as outsiders or a problem. We are witnessing the biggest displacement in our history - not from dams or mega-projects but through government policies.

That’s the question - those who are doing it must know what they are doing, isn’t it? How do you explain this?

The levers of powers are basically in the hands of those who are taking instructions from multi-lateral funding agencies like the World Bank and IMF, or their thinking is in perfect harmony with the philosophy of these institutions. Montek Singh Ahluwalia is an example of this. This also partly explains the regressive legislation that Maharashtra brought in on water use last year. Our policies now are designed to transfer wealth to the rich.

Unfortunately, or fortunately for us, those who work out these policies do not have to go to the people, do not have to ask for votes every five years. It was not Ahluwalia but Sonia Gandhi who went to the people in 2004, she had to win, Congress had to be elected. When this hits home, there will be some change and some re-think on policies, and some lives saved. The way I see it, the Congress party has serious problems with the government on this front, but the government looks at the party as if it were a bother. Somewhere it has to change. The PM possibly sent out the strongest message in Vidarbha when he told the officials making the presentation: "Don’t go by GRs and statistics. This is about human distress". So, some understanding is there, at least at the Centre. Why the Congress chief minister in Maharashtra does not get the message is a mystery.

Tell us how you first came upon the story of suicides and what it has meant to you as a journalist to live with such realities for six years.

I had been covering rural distress since 1993. In fact, suicides form a small part of the work on rural distress itself. But it so happened that there were a few hundred deaths recorded in Anantapur and Mehboobnagar in AP since 1998. A journalist Narasimha Reddy with Eenadu said that there was something strange happening, that a large number of deaths had happened due to stomach-ache. We were shocked, we read the FIRs, went from village to village. In a government teaching hospital, some 300 were brought in 11 months and a young doctor Rama Devi was maintaining a log of these deaths. Our worst fears were confirmed. Where we believed one farmer had committed suicide, it turned out that five to seven had. Then, the numbers just kept piling up.

Whatever profession you're in affects you depending on the way you approach it. Why make a production number of it? I have always loved rural reporting and haven’t been bored a minute. In fact, I have been very lucky to have, all along, the freedom to cover these issues. However, the appalling levels of distress I am forced to confront in the past few years has really been devastating. These are human beings, not "stories". Watching the cruelty inflicted by conscious policy is very damaging to each one of us. You know that people are dying who shouldn't have, needn't have. You know that people are being robbed of resources and capabilities to fuel lifestyles of the rich, that livelihoods are being destroyed in countless numbers. Perhaps more than most other things, the sheer cruelty of it is stunning. And the apathy or unwillingness of our own media to even look at it in depth except in spurts, that hurts too. The suicides themselves are very painful and, I think, quite internally destructive to those who must cover them, check them out.