India’s Ailing Underbelly

The facts are appalling and the figures disturbing and yet very little effort has been made to address issue that making the globalizing efforts and booming economy a mockery. When farmers begin to commit suicide in such large numbers then the State needs to sit up and take notice. It would be futile to blame others for the uneven distribution of means and justice that has taken place in rural India and the little attention that has been paid to it.

by SHIBANI DASGUPTA

It is a picture of stark contrasts- tension and strife versus deaths by suicide and resultant misery. Low wages preferably no wages, very little

food and a lot of exploitation amidst an inhospitable terrain in which eking out a living is perhaps the most difficult thing to do.

On an average one Indian farmer committed suicide every 30 minutes between 1997 and 2002, an appalling reality. The picture improved somewhat between 1997 and 2005, when statisticians reported on an average one farmer took his or her life every 53 minutes in just the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh. The states have together seen 89,362 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2005.

Very obviously, there are huge gaps in the people’s hopes, aspirations, needs, desires, wants and what they actually get. A team of print media that traveled through Chhatisgarh, many parts of which are in the hands of the outlawed Naxalites described the scenario thus: it was a gateway to a land unseen by globalizing, booming India, yet only an hour away from Mumbai by air flight to the northeast of the business capital.

It is a lush, green land in the heart of the country, sprawling over five states. Here, it seems that the Indian state no longer exists. It is from here that the have-nots of an unevenly prospering nation wage a grim war against the government, armed with weapons mostly stolen from the ‘enemy’ the term they like to use for the Indian security forces. It is also noticed that the ideology is imported from the China of Mao-Tse-Tung, from the 1960s.

The tribal psyche has over the years been groomed to believe especially amongst local warrior tribes, that for decades, the government and its business groups have carried out a multi-billion rupee trade in tobacco and firewood, without sharing the resultant riches with them. So, the government has to be and has been shunted out.

The reporter says every government run primary school, post office and hospital there in Chhatisgarh has been taken over by Naxalites-the local engines of Maoist revolutionist thought. Though its name is derived from Naxalbari, a small village in West Bengal from where the armed uprising took place - Chhatisgarh is the “Liberated Zones” blood soaked battleground, with 134 police men killed between January and October 07, more than in any other state in India.

Who join the Naxalites? According to an unnamed commando who was forced to join the Naxalite movement, there are very few choices-it was a volunteer they (the Maoists) wanted every time they attacked a village or Rs. 500 for refusing. No money meant offering a volunteer, like this unnamed Naxal soldier who is expected to be toting a gun and keeping an eye on any government policeman.

Villagers pay with money, or with food, shelter, clothes and medicine. Families who cannot afford to pay in any form, in the desperately poor area, where the monthly per capital income is less than Rs 200 per month, (about 40 per cent less than the national average), give their men and boys to the revolution. According to statistics available, 644 tribal villages were wiped out by the violence in Dantewada district alone. In Bijapur and Dantewada districts villagers told a visiting media team, the police have not ventured in the two decades. The Maoists, it was felt may re-distribute this land among themselves. With these villages gone, the security forces seem to have lost the few local informers they had there.

The other problem that ails Central India-farmers’ suicide-has been studied in some detail by a Chennai based NGO, based on National Crime Records’ Bureau has found that the states can be divided into four types as stated earlier. It is reported that some states notably Maharashtra have made identification and notification of the suicides very difficult by using indicators that rule out vast numbers from being categorized. In Karnataka, according to the Chennai survey, there were over 20,000 deaths during the period under study 1997-2005. Madhya Pradesh has been a problem state for farmers.-the increase being above 11 percent in the period 1997-2005.

Madhya Pradesh including Chhatisgarh saw 23,588 deaths in the 1997-2005 period, although it escaped the media radar as a farm crisis state. This inspite of the finding that the percentage of total suicides reached 21.9 in 2005 as against a national average of 15.5. It meant that more than one out of every five persons taking his or her life in these states that year was a farmer. Also, one in every four suicides in this group was committed using pesticides.

According to the findings of the study, which is a surprise and concerns a state outside the big four is Kerala. It saw a total of more than 11,500 deaths during 1997-2005 perhaps the worst period being 1998-2003, when the state government was forced to create a debt relief commission, which thankfully reduced the pressure on farmers and very few rural suicides were reported after that.

This action shows that the government - state or central - can if it so desires and take timely measures to reduce if not mitigate the poor, needy and below poverty line peoples ‘woes, the writ of law can run. It has to be a well thought out and people friendly, preventive action. At least one fourth of the people of this country could then live in peace, prosperity and harmony.