A reality check for Ajit Singh

First, the report doesn’t, in isolation, mention crop failure as the reason for the nine suicides. It says, lack of irrigation and new techniques, repeated drought-induced crop failures and the resulting heavy debt for years led these farmers to take their own lives. Second, the report was based on the inputs collected by the Express directly from six of the nine villages where the suicides were reported.

At every village, the police patil was contacted to verify if the panchanama and police report mention mounting debt as the reason for suicide. The affected families, too, confirmed it. Some of the families were even visited by the tehsildars concerned. Facts were verified a third time with other villagers. Invariably, everywhere the villagers seemed to concur. All the points were thus thoroughly crosschecked.

To get down to ground realities — for one, this is not the first instance of suicides by cotton farmers. In 1997, the spate of suicides in Vidarbha’s cotton belt was a major embarrassment for the then Sena-BJP government. Then, too, the cotton district of Yavatmal had reported most of the suicides. The fact that this year so many of them took place in a short period, again in the district’s core cotton-producing area of Ralegaon, called for special attention. And, with governments casually treating them as routine happenings, who will take cognisance if not the newspapers?

Incidentally, many more suicides have been reported in the media since the Express report of November 19. As for the conclusions of the state government’s ‘inquiry’ into the nine Yavatmal cases, it is a travesty of truth to say that they were due to psychic or non-agricultural reasons. Unlike in cities, most suicides in villages are committed by bread-earners, a clear indication that they are caused by economic factors. Thus, if we are serious about inquiring into these deaths, we need to go beyond cryptic inferences like ‘psychic’.