Monday, May 04, 2009
Children of Indian Debt Suicide (photo: Shubhranshu Choudhary-Down to Earth)
The headline was shocking: “1,500 Farmers Commit Mass Suicide in India.” The story began in Northern Ireland’s Belfast Telegraph, was picked up by The Independent in England, and spread to the United States as a home-page story on the Huffington Post. However, it turned out that there hadn’t been a mass suicide. But this journalistic embarrassment did call attention to a real tragedy: the fact that there is a rising tide of farmer suicides throughout India.
From 1997 to 2007, approximately 182,936 farmers committed suicide, according to the National Crime Records Bureau of India. This is the equivalent of 46 farmer suicides every day or roughly one suicide every 30 minutes. In addition, the Bureau reported that 1,600 farmers in Chhattisgarh state committed suicide in 2007 alone. The suicides, for the most part, are the result of farmers spiraling into debt after borrowing money from a bank or individuals. Farmers borrow money for a multiplicity of reasons—medical bills, daughter’s weddings, investing in high-yield seeds—and instances of drought or crop failure force farmers to miss payments and incur additional late fees to such a devastating extent that the farmers can no longer pay their debts.
-Erika K. Solanki
The Tragedy of Farmers Suicides in India (by Mallika Chopra, Huffington Post)
1,500 Indian Farmers Commit Mass Suicide: Why We Are Complicit in These Deaths (by Tara Lohan, AlterNet)
1,500 Farmers Commit Mass Suicide in India (Belfast Telegraph)
4 Farmers Kill Themselves Every Day (by Krishnakumar P., Rediff India Abroad)
“All Idiot Farmers Commit Suicide” (by Shubhrahshu Choudhary, Down To Earth)
On India’s Farms, a Plague of Suicide (by Somin Sengupta, New York Times)
The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalization (by Vandana Shiva, ZNet)
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