The apparently horribly gone wrong suicide stunt of Gajendra Singh at the AAP farmers rally being addressed by Arvind Kejriwal in New Delhi has turned a tragedy into a nauseating rotating stage drama by politicians of all hues and colors. They see votes in death. Few of them seem to understand the reality that has overtaken farming in India. With almost 60% of the population still dependent on it, Agriculture’s share of the GDP has declined to just 13% and declining fast. Very simply it means that farming only ensures greater relative poverty.
To make farming profitable two things need to happen. One is that less people are involved in it and the other is that farm produce gets higher prices. Only rapid industrialization will ensure the former and a drastic reduction in the cross web of state interference to curb prices for urban people. Neither is happening in India. This is a huge challenge and politicians, be it Narendra Modi or Sonia Gandhi or Mulayam Singh Yadav or Arvind Kejriwal, but being politicians they will always take the easy way out. They will keep visiting the homes of the suicides.
But are farmer suicides more recent phenomena or has the incidence grown recently? Suicides have been a part of our life since time immemorial. People in all walks of life kill themselves for various reasons. And some people are more predisposed to killing themselves than most. The incidence of farmer suicides is actually not as high as the protesting decibels would suggest. In fact the incidence of suicides among farmers is far less than the general trend.
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