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 Vidarbharegion, 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 ofThe 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 Indianagriculture.