A very famous public service announcement once made the visual claim, that every time the performer snapped his fingers, a child died in Africa.
Such analogies are supposed to jerk the audience out of an assumed slumber and awaken them to a pressing humanitarian issue. Similarly, in India, the data in 2015 showed that a farmer was committing suicide every hour.
Two years have passed, but the Centre has yet to acknowledge the existence of an agricultural crisis. Veteran reporters like P. Sainath have stressed on this issue for years but to little avail. The fast-growing urban economy outpaces all other rural stories when it comes to the narratives of ‘issues’ that the Indian state has to tackle.
Since 1995, 300,000 farmers have committed suicide. These figures do not account for the underreporting of farmer suicides since 2014 when the National Crime Records Database stopped including the deaths of agricultural labourers in their tolls. It’s more than the number of Indians that have been killed in wars and terrorist attacks since independence. It’s more than the number of Indians that died fighting in World War 2. And timed as these figures do with India’s economic liberalisation, it suggests that this growth came at a tremendous and terrible cost.
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