Condemning the BJP-led Madhya Pradesh government for the continued suicides by farmers in the state, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh on Thursday said the 'insensitive behaviour' of the state government was forcing farmers to take the extreme step. In a statement issued on Thursday, Singh said that "because of the state government's insensitive behaviour, farmers were losing patience and being forced to take the extreme step of ending their lives." Seven farmers...

Crop failure, debts, and personal reasons behind deaths Seven farmers have committed suicide in Madhya Pradesh in less than a month. Kanhaiya Patel (30) of Hata village in Damoh district committed suicide on Wednesday taking the total to seven. He had taken an acre of land on lease and had a debt of Rs.20,000. After his entire arhar (pulses) crop failed, the landowner is reported to have said that if any compensation...

The question raises funDamental issues about the MGNREGA’s centralised template and poor delivery mechanism, but it is important to provide a legal basis to its wage structure to protect it against inflation. We need to remember that the way the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was originally conceived, wages were never meant to be equal to the minimum wages; they should have been lower. This is because the...

Madhya Pradesh Farmer Welfare and Agriculture Development Minister Ramkrishna Kusmaria has courted a controversy by blaming farmers’ suicides on their “past sins”. “These are old sins that are resulting in such incidents,”the minister told a TV channel on Wednesday, and elaborated it by pointing to indiscriminate use of “chemicals” that has reduced the fertility and “resistance power” of agricultural land. A few cases of farmers’ suicides have been recently reported from Damoh,...

Depressed over his crop getting Damaged due to frost, a farmer attempted suicide by consuming pesticide in Madhya Pradesh's Damoh district Monday. It was the second such incident in the past three days in the district. The BJP government denied that any farmer had tried to kill himself due to debt. State Minister and government spokesperson Narottam Mishra told reporters: 'No farmer has committed suicide due to debt and there is...