Punjab suicides: Story of debt foretold

BATHINDA, June 16: After Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra, it's now Punjab. Reports of debt-related suicides of farmers are trickling in fr...

BATHINDA, June 16: After Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra, it8217;s now Punjab. Reports of debt-related suicides of farmers are trickling in from the state which heralded the green revolution. Sucked into a vicious cycle of bad crops and unpaid loans, more and more cotton farmers in the prosperous state are consuming Celphos, the Rs 10-a-bottle insecticide.

The story of the Punjab cotton farmer is so similar to the stories told and retold in Andhra or elsewhere. It begins with the farmer taking a loan from a bank for a crop. The crop is bad and he is unable to repay or go in for the next crop. The farmer turns to a moneylender, borrows money but the crop fails again. The farmer has nowhere to go or hide from the moneylender. The story ends in Celphos tablets.

Karnail Singh of Gill Khurd village in Bathinda owed banks and moneylenders Rs 6 lakh. When the moneylender came calling, Karnail Singh thought of the unthinkable: selling off his 11 acres. But he could not find a buyer. Two weeks ago, he ended hislife by consuming the insecticide.

On May 14, Kuljit Singh, a farmer of Sangrur District, hacked his wife and minor son to death and later swallowed Celphos tablets. He had to repay Rs 8 lakh.

A day later, Mohan Singh of Teona village, nine km from Bathinda, threw himself in front of a running train. He had borrowed Rs 1.5 lakh from banks and an arhtiya commission agent and the crop failed.

On May 20, Jasbhakar Singh, 33, of the same village consumed Celphos tablets. He had already sold of two-thirds of his land, but the debt and the interest kept mounting.

On June 11, successive crop failures and unpaid loans drove Kirpal Singh of Longowal village to Celphos. Before the embers of his pyre died down, his wife Mandip Kaur administered poison to her infant son and then ended her own life.

It8217;s all happening in Punjab where agriculture was equated with prosperity. The failure of the cotton crop for the fifth consecutive year has reduced the farmers to penury and impaired theircapacity to repay loans. The crop touched an all-time low of 7.13 lakh bales against the target of 22 lakh bales this year. This has resulted in a severe cash crunch in the entire cotton-belt comprising the districts of Bathinda, Mansa, Sangrur, Faridkot, Ferozepur, Muktsar and Moga.

With the joint family system becoming history, the size of land holdings, especially in this part of the state, has been reduced significantly.

Despite the small size of the holding, the farmers keep tractors and other heavy machinery which render agriculture unprofitable. According to a recent survey, t also stated that in this border state of Punjab, 72 per cent of the farms are less than 10 acres in area. Another problem is drug addiction among farmers. According to Neeraj Bassi, Project Director of the Bathinda Drug-Deaddiction Centre, drug addiction is rampant among the small farmers and farm-hands in the cotton belt.

But there8217;s more to the farmers8217; problems than these factors. According to Sukhdev Singh, formerAgricultural Commissioner to Government of India, the spate of suicides, a recent phenomenon, is the outcome of a build-up of circumstances over the years. After the Green Revolution in late 1960s, which brought wheat-paddy and wheat-cotton rotation to predominance, a number of crop alternatives have been tried but without much success.

Fifteen years ago, a high-level expert committee headed by S S Johl prepared a blueprint for diversification of farming but the things have not changed. The failed experiments of introducing new crops and popularising fruits like grapes and kinnow and vegetables have left farmers only poorer.

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quot;Experiments on the farm front have failed because of lack of efficient marketing, poor crop production technology, inability of the Government specialists to guide the farmers and lack of thrust on agro-processing and agro-industries,quot; says Sukhdev Singh.

According to agricultural experts the farm research and extension services have also failed to keep pace with advances in thefield. The problems of Punjab farmers have, meanwhile, multiplied. For instance, a decade ago water logging was confined to about 10,000 hectares in the state but spread last year to more than one lakh hectares in southern districts. As a result, the farmers have been reporting continuous crop failures over the past few years.