-Livemint.com Thanks to the debt relief commission, 11,354 Kerala farmers have benefited from a disbursement of over ?11 crore, and there are no farmer suicides in the state Ernakulam/ Bengaluru: Back in 2006, Kerala came face to face with an explosive situation. Ironically in a state dominated by Communist politicians, farming was dominated by export-oriented cash crops such as rubber and pepper, prices of which had plunged in the global market. It...

-Business Standard Those who want to help India's farmers should be working much harder to figure out what they really need It’s election season in India and the money is flowing. Governments in many states have begun waiving tens of millions of dollars’ worth of loans to poor farmers in an effort to buy their loyalty. The argument – widely accepted by politicians and journalists, the demographic groups with the least fiscal...

-Hindustan Times In the discourse on agriculture, for instance, farmer suicides are cited as the biggest proof of the agrarian crisis in the country by a large section. India’s political economy discourse is often a prisoner of the dictum that when there is no theory, there is a conspiracy theory. Corruption, rather than an accentuated cyclical shock after the global financial crisis, combined with the poor governance structures in Indian...

-Newsclick.in Funding is not keeping pace with demand, and delays or vanished dues are discouraging job seekers in these times of extreme rural distress. Here is a little known but chilling fact about the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS: between April and mid-December this year, about 1.28 crore people who demanded jobs were turned back. This refusal to give work has been happening every year but it has increased after the Modi...

Passionate about the deepening of agrarian crisis, quite often journalists and media persons cite figures related to farm suicide (as provided by the National Crime Records Bureau) in order to draw the attention of the readers. They do so in the following ways: * Compare the absolute number of farm suicides (viz. suicide by cultivators + suicide by agricultural labourers) across regions/ states for a particular time point or time period...