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...

The Central government should evolve a policy of announcing remunerative price for agricultural produces in advance to bail out farmers from possible distress said Karnataka minister for rural development and panchayat raj Jagadish Shettar. Presiding over the function to inaugurate the Krishi Mela-2010 and Jilla Krishi Utsav at University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) here on Sunday he said such a move on the part of the Centre would enable farmers to...

Three farmers in the district have committed suicide at three different places due to Debts, police said today. The incident occurred yesterday, they said. Yogesh Mankar (29), a resident of Taharabad, and Sukhdev Shinde (55), a resident of Devla, had taken loan from banks and failed to repay it because of which they committed suicide, police said. Meanwhile, Shivaji Sapnar, a farmer from Ujani also committed suicide. However, the cause of his...

Trade unions and labour rights activists blame the high suicide rate in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, on the practices of the garment industry. TIRUPUR has carved out a niche for itself in the world of garments. Its phenomenal growth in the highly competitive global scenario, particularly in the past two decades, has been made possible by the entrepreneurial spirit of its manufacturers and exporters and the sweat and labour of thousands of...

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...