Peepli Live, and suicides of farmers in India

On the flight back home, I got to watch Peepli Live, which I blogged about a couple of months ago.  I noted then, after watching the trailer and reading about it:

It so reminds me of a Tamil film from three decades ago, called "Thanneer Thanneer", which in English would translate to "Water, Water."  Adapted from a play, the movie was one sarcastic comedy on the plight of the poor, the bureaucracy, and the self-promoting and self-aggrandizing politicians.  It was brilliant.

Peepli is pretty much along the same lines of rural poverty, grossly-self interested politicians and bureaucrats, and competing cable news channels that are trying to one-up each other on sensational reporting.  It was well done.

I am not sure how many in India watched the movie though--after all, Indians are the ones who need to recognize, understand, and act on the situation presented there.

Indians need to engage in this because it is not merely a satirical movie, but a terribly tragic reality of farmers and their spouses committing suicides in order to escape the debts; Sainath had a poignant column in The Hindu:

A sharp increase in farm suicides in 2009 with at least 17,368 farmers killing themselves in the year of “rural resurgence.” That's over 7 per cent higher than in 2008 and the worst numbers since 2004. This brings the total farm suicides since 1997 to 216,500. While all suicides have multiple causes, their strong concentration within regions and among cash crop farmers is an alarming and dismal trend.

Insanely tragic this statistic is.

Here is the irony that Sainath points out--banks loan out money for wealthy rural folks to buy Mercedes Benz cars at 7 percent interest rate, while farmers will be lucky to get 9 percent loans for tractors:

It took roughly a decade and tens of thousands of suicides before Indian farmers got loans at 7 per cent interest — many, in theory only. Prior to 2005, those who got any bank loans at all shelled out between 9 and 12 per cent. Several were forced to take non-agricultural loans at even higher rates of interest. Buy a Mercedes, pay 7 per cent interest. Buy a tractor, pay 12 per cent. The hallowed micro-finance institutions (MFIs) do worse. There, it's smaller sums at interest rates of between 24 and 36 per cent or higher.

Now, how about the data on the suicides?

these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer's suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman's name.

Then there is the plain fraud that some governments resort to. Maharashtra being the classic example. The government here has lied so many times that it contradicts itself thrice within a week. In May this year, for instance, three ‘official' estimates of farm suicides in the worst-hit Vidarbha region varied by 5,500 per cent. The lowest count being just six in four months (See “How to be an eligible suicide,” The Hindu, May 13, 2010).

The NCRB figure for Maharashtra as a whole in 2009 is 2,872 farmers' suicides. So it remains the worst State for farm suicides for the tenth year running. The ‘decline' of 930 that this figure represents would be joyous if true. But no State has worked harder to falsify reality. For 13 years, the State has seen a nearly unrelenting rise. Suddenly, there's a drop of 436 and 930 in 2008 and 2009. How? For almost four years now, committees have functioned in Vidarbha's crisis districts to dismiss most suicides as ‘non-genuine.' What is truly frightening is the Maharashtra government's notion that fixing the numbers fixes the problem.

What does it all mean?

It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don't change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.