“Publicly available statistics from the Indian government show that 166,304 farmers in India have committed suicide over the last ten years. The death rate has been increasing throughout the past decade, to the point where today there is a suicide every 30 minutes. More shockingly, these figures are understated as they neglect the inclusion of women, who are not recognized as landowners and therefore not considered to be farmers.”
Comment:
Problems in sanitation and water in India were my first interests when I began writing as a citizen journalist. But the farming crisis is something I don’t completely understand. Obviously the number of suicides among farmers, who constitute a sizeable proportion of the Indian population, would be high in a country with a population of a billion plus. What I need to research is the relationship they have to the rate of suicide in other segments of the population, in other states, and at other times.
Here is more on the subject from Sainath, an Indian journalist who has won international accolades covering the story. Sainath is a big critic of the neo-liberal growth oriented model of development in India between 1991 and today – the so-called “liberalization” of India.
Arguing the opposite, here is Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University professor, and a well-known advocate for liberalization, whose lucid and very well-written books I referenced for the chapters on globalization in “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.”
I will be posting more as I read.
(An aside: This subject is not at all disconnected from my interests on the American political front, since the same players in the banking scandals – Goldman Sachs et. al.. – have been investing heavily in Indian real estate in agricultural areas. That’s the plus side of being a generalist, in an age when specialization is the norm. You can connect the dots better and faster. One example. The only reason I was able to see that the torture of women at Abu Ghraib wasn’t an ‘Arab street rumor’ was because I had seen at first-hand how the American legal, medical, and carceral systems can operate when it comes to people without money or clout. I say “can” because this is not a blanket indictment of the system, which still has safeguards and balances beyond what exists in most countries. In fact, given the sustained nature of the state’s assault on the tradition of individual liberty here, I’m surprised how well civil society still functions, however crippled and muffled by the federal government.
Back to India. The India “growth” story always had a good deal of varnish in it. Anyone who lives there or visits often knows the downside of having huge multinationals parked in your back yard – skyrocketing rents/land prices, water shortages, electricity “brown-outs” that go on for hours in the summer. There have some been good things too, of course. Jobs, more and better goods and services, better roads and communication. Nevertheless, growth is a much more complicated story than the investment community would have you believe.