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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Punjab elections: The cycle of debts and farmer suicides blight India's grain bowl -Binayak Dasgupta and Gurpreet Singh Nibber

Punjab elections: The cycle of debts and farmer suicides blight India's grain bowl -Binayak Dasgupta and Gurpreet Singh Nibber

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published Published on Jan 17, 2017   modified Modified on Jan 17, 2017
-Hindustan Times

Hamirgarh/ Dhanaula/ Chandigarh: Gurpreet Singh and Sandeep Duggal have more than 350 friends on Facebook. At 19, Gurpreet’s profile clearly gravitates to pictures of youth – astride an Enfield motorcycle, one with a friend in the corridors of a college, and the quintessential selfie with sunglasses.

Duggal’s is more subdued. In a black-and-white profile photograph, he smiles with arms folded, exuding the confidence of a young man who identifies himself as ‘MD, Deepak Dhaba’.

Facebook and youth is where the similarities between Gurpreet and Sandeep end.

Gurpreet’s father, farmer in Hamirgarh in Punjab’s south-western district Sangrur, used a handful of Celphos tablets (a pesticide) to end his life at 47. In his last days, he owed Rs 4.5 lakh to the banks. That he kept ill most of the time did not help.

“I don’t know what I will do now,” say Gurpreet, standing with his mother in the courtyard of his modest house.

Nearly 80 km away, Sandeep – whose parents or grandparents were never into farming – oversees the brisk business of Deepak Dhaba that employs more than 60 people.

“Almost all our kitchen staff is from outside Punjab. People here are too proud to be seen working at a dhaba,” says Mandeep, Sandeep’s brother. Their father started the business in 1986 as a small eatery named after his eldest son before it turned into one of the most well-known pit stops in this part of the state.

Like Gurpreet’s father, nearly 7,000 farmers and farm labourers killed themselves in the decade between 2000 and 2010. “That number has been equalled, or even surpassed, in the last six years,” says Sukhpal Singh, the head of Punjab Agriculture University’s (PAU) economics department and the coordinator of a government-sanctioned census of farm suicides.

Activist Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who runs a non-profit to help families of farmers who kill themselves doubts the figures will be made public in an election year. “The problem is two-fold. It’s in the government’s interest to keep suicide figures low. And many aren’t reported because of the Punjabi pride – suicide is a social stigma,” according to Jaijee.

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Hindustan Times, 13 January, 2017, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/punjab-elections-the-cycle-of-debts-and-farmer-suicides-blight-india-s-grain-bowl/story-FxYg64cXtYnNEjSANAkGJP.html


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