According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...
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Debt-hit Vidarbha farmers stare at land loss
SCORES of farmers mired in debt in the arid cotton belt of Vidarbha in Maharashtra are close to losing their property rights, as the state-controlled Land Development Bank has kick-started the process to recover dues from them. A top revenue ministry official said the process to recover loans by selling off land belonging to those farmers who have defaulted is “definitely on” and could start as early as July 23....
More »Built on illusion by Jayati Ghosh
The collapse of the Dubai dream is not without any implications; it may be an indication that the travails of finance capitalism are not over. GLOBAL capitalism is in a phase in which it must deal with the fruits of the overextension during the previous boom, and there is no doubt that this is going to be painful. The financial crisis in the United States and some other developed countries...
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KEY TRENDS • Suicide by self-employed persons in agriculture as a percentage of total suicides at the national level stood at 15.6 percent in 1996, 16.3 percent in 2002, 14.4 percent in 2006, 13.7 percent in 2009, 11.9 percent in 2010, 10.3 percent in 2011, 11.4 percent in 2012 and 8.73 percent in 2013. Suicides committed in the farming sector (by farmers plus agricultural labourers) as a proportion of total suicides in India was 9.4 percent in...
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Output and Growth According to the [inside]Economic Survey 2017-18, Volume-2[/inside] (please click here to access): • The growth rates of agriculture & allied sectors have been fluctuating at 1.5 per cent in 2012-13, 5.6 per cent in 2013-14, (-) 0.2 per cent in 2014-15, 0.7 per cent in 2015-16 and 4.9 per cent in 2016-17. • The Gross Capital Formation (GCF) in Agriculture and Allied Sectors relative to Gross Value Added (GVA) in...
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