'Erratic rainfall and rising input costs forcing farmers to migrate' “Unable to clear a loan of Rs 2 lakh, my son committed suicide. I had to sell my ancestral house and cattle to repay the loan,” says Lakshmi Devi, 48, of Pathakotha Cheruvu village in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur district. Devi's woes did not end with the repayment of loan. Managing her farm is becoming increasingly difficult, partly because it is expensive,...

Faulty procurement, rising farm inputs force West Bengal farmers to commit suicide LONG known as farmer friendly, West Bengal is now making headlines for farmers’ suicides. Reportedly 31 farmers, including landless farm labourers and small traders of agriculture produce, in the state took their lives between October last year and January. Twenty-one of the 31 deaths are from the state’s rice bowl Burdwan district. And this is probably a reason the spate...

The data show that rural families simply cannot subsist on farm incomes alone There must be a bit of Gandhi in all of us because often our idea of India ultimately boils down to the kisan as the standard bearer of the lakhs of villages that comprise India. Perhaps that is why I tend to look for the signs of transformation in the lives of Indian farmers. The changes in...

West Bengal: An agrarian crisis looms over the State as farmers commit suicide in spite of a bumper crop. THE topic of suicide figured repeatedly in Safar Molla's conversations with his neighbours a few days before his death. The 18-year-old marginal farmer from Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district's Bhatar block talked about it quite casually, in fact even jocularly. Everybody in the village knew he was up to his neck in...

In the summer of 2009, farmer Ramesh Dhumale was excited when he got to plant about a kilo of seeds of what was pitched as the country’s first indigenously developed genetically modified (GM) cotton. At Rs 200 a kg, the seeds were far cheaper than the Rs 1,500-2,000 that the other GM cotton seeds cost. But the biggest plus was that the farmers could use and reuse the seeds from successive...