It's official. Even as Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy admitted there had been 20 suicides by farmers in the state in the last 40 days, yet another case came to light on Saturday. Peddolla Nadipi Bhumanna hanged himself at home in Donchanda village of Morthad mandal late on Friday night. It’s learnt that the 55-year-old farmer, faced with crop failure, was driven to desperation because he was...

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...

KEY TRENDS  • The NSS 59th Round (January-December 2003) had found that 48.6% farmer households were indebted while the NSS 70th Round (January-December 2013) has observed that 52% of India's agricultural households were indebted in July, 2012-June, 2013 $   • A similar survey on rural indebtedness by the NSSO in 1991 found indebtedness among only 26% of farmers $   • On an average, the amount of debt per farmer household was Rs. 12,585 during NSS...

KEY TRENDS  • The new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million @* • The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the...

KEY TRENDS • As per the information collected by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) upto 31 October, 2017, 41,89,827 claims (40,50,131 individual and 1,39,696 community claims) have been filed and 18,24,271 titles (17,59,955 individual and 64,316 community claims) have been distributed. A total of 36,51,414 (87.15 percent) claims have been disposed off @@ • In the last 10 years, only 3 percent of the minimum potential of CFR rights could be...