Farmers' Suicides in India Some Sociological Reflections1 Dr P. Radhakrishnan

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
Mahatma Gandhi's cliché that 'India lives in its villages' is still very important, albeit to a lesser extent than about 60-70 years ago. However, the India of his cliché has of late been in its last gasp. Central to understanding the tide of farmers' suicides and the possibilities of reversing it is the agrarian distress since the mid-1990s in certain parts of the country among certain sections of the people.

Accordingly, this paper will present an overview of India's agrarian society; an account of its agrarian distress; the nexus between agrarian distress and farmers' suicides; the larger contexts of both; and the possible remedies for mitigating the distress and minimising the suicides.

India's Agrarian Society
India is still predominantly an agrarian society. Nearly three-fourths of its population lives in rural areas2. Agriculture, the means of livelihood for two-thirds of the population, and an important source of raw materials for industry3, is recognised as a key to India's economy. The profound changes in Indian agriculture since the 1960s have had cascading effects on India's agrarian economy and society.

These changes may be understood in two broad phases, namely, as the effects of the 'green revolution' technology, and of the industry-market-MNCs driven agriculture. Related to both were the agrarian reforms, which gradually loosened the existing and emergent farming classes from the traditional safety-nets at the community level and forced them to be under the newly institutionalised bureaucratised farm services away from the gaze of the village locals.

Of the first, which facilitated a trebling of the area under irrigation and a hundred-fold increase in the consumption of chemical fertilizers4, Stern (1993: 9, 119-20) wrote:

Basically [the green revolution technology] is the application of high inputs of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation waters to specially developed, high-yielding varieties of seeds … It is a technology for commercial agriculture. It has developed along with lending agencies and physical and administrative marketing facilities. The green revolution has become, in effect, not merely the technology but the strategy for the development of commercial agriculture in India. The economy of bourgeois revolution in the Indian countryside is commercial agriculture … To India's growing number of green revolution farmers, their increased production would, of course, be useless… without markets in which to sell it. Increasingly, their markets have become part of a national market. The Indian Union is their national market. The Government of India is their guarantor of privileged access to the Indian market and its regulator, the subsidizer of the prices they pay for chemical fertilizer and the supporter through its procurement programs of the prices they receive for their produce. Agricultural development and political democracy have been the principal ingredients of bourgeois revolution in the Indian countryside. Its principal [though by no means, sole] participants and beneficiaries are those households the upper quintile , which operate four or more hectares, as proprietors or controllers. Most of them operate fewer than 8 hectares. In a generation they have ceased being “peasants,” i.e., subject cultivators, and they have become capitalist farmers: legally secure in their tenure, acquisitive, enterprising, socially mobile, exploitive of their labourers, ambitious for their children, politically assertive and the force to be reckoned with in local and state politics.

Stern's observations supplement those of Srinivas made in the late 1970s (1992: 78) that the landowning families from the dominant and high castes are among the greatest beneficiaries from India's independence. His reference was to the rich landowners; and his following observation about them (ibid.) is particularly relevant to the scope of this paper.

They are politically powerful, especially at the state level and they have used their power to strengthen themselves economically. They have a fair representation in the bureaucracy and the professions, though the quantum of their representation varies from state to state. The partiality of this class for large, sprawling families enables them to operate in both rural and urban areas, using their urban contacts to exploit better their rural opportunities and vice-versa, just as they use their political power to gain access to wealth, education and the professions. They are the oppressors and exploiters of Harijans, landless labourers and the other rural poor; they have used their power at the state level to delay and sabotage land reforms.

As the observations by Stern and Srinivas are still valid, it is only fair to say that India's embourgeoisment has further impoverished its traditionally impoverished millions. Among the main indicators of this are the nature of India's agricultural holdings and the composition of its rural workforce:

Marginal and small farmers are predominant in Indian agriculture. Their holdings accounted for 73 percent of the total operational holdings during 1976-77, 76 percent during 1985-86 and 80 percent during 1995-96. Of the total area operated, marginal and small farmers operated only 23 percent, 29 percent, and 36 percent during these years. Their average size of holdings for these years was less than a hectare5. More than half the work-force even during 2001 was in agriculture. India's rural poor, both the work-force and the small land holders, were vulnerable even in its traditional society, especially during crop failures, famines, and natural calamities. But their continued vulnerability and the presence of traditional buffers in some sense made them resilient to natural and man-made hardships and to distress situations. Despite their resilience, how come their vulnerability assumed distress proportions recently. While the root-cause of this could be traced to the working of the green-revolution technology, which left untouched among others, cotton, jute and tea, which Stern rightly characterised as 'a rural slum of the British empire', (P. 9) its culprit-cause is undoubtedly the fast unfolding globalisation.

Agrarian Distress
There have been competing interpretive claims about the situations of the subsistence (marginal and small) farmers, which have been causing them distress. These claims began with the exacerbation of the condition of the farmers in Andhra Pradesh, the persistence of which for about a decade now has made this state the focus of the debates on the dismal failure of the agrarian sector, governance at the levels of the state and the Centre, and of India's economic reforms to address the problems of the subsistence farmers.

Andhra Pradesh
Of the main workers in Andhra Pradesh nearly two-thirds were in agriculture according to the Census 2001. The marginal and small holdings in the state accounted for 81 percent of the total operational holdings during 1995-96. However, these holdings together had only 43 percent of the total area operated; and the average size of holding was less than a hectare (0.94 hectare).

Of the gross cropped area from 1992 to 1999, nearly half was under non-food-grains. Of the net sown area during the same period the net irrigated area was only about 38 percent to 41 percent. The gross irrigated area was almost the same. The gross cropped area under cotton steadily increased from 13 percent in 1992 to 19 percent in 1997, along with a steady increase in fertilizer consumption and farmers indebtedness6. These are only part of the ingredients that went into the making of the distress-brew in Andhra Pradesh, and for that matter in other states especially in south India, Maharashtra, and Punjab,

Distress Discourse
In a long and incisive essay, `Deadly Crop: Difficult Times Drive India's Cotton Farmers to Desperate Actions', in the Wall Street Journal of 18 February 1998, Jonathan Karp discussed many of the causes of the farmers hardships. This was in the context of cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, focussing on Warangal district, its distress-suicide epicentre.

Stating that King cotton has turned killer cotton in southern India, Karp observed that though agriculture largely propelled India's 7.5 percent gross domestic product growth for the year ended 31 March 1997, economic expansion is bypassing some of India's most impoverished rural areas, and many people, like the cotton farmers, are trapped in a feudal time warp. Karp's related observations are: small farmers - the vast majority of whom own less than five acres of land which make modern farming difficult - like other Indians on the margins of the economy, feel squeezed as never before by India's economic reforms, which they resent.

Economic Boom's Dark Side
Karp added that subsidy cuts have made seeds, fertilizers and electricity more costly, while remaining trade barriers prevent farmers from fetching a higher price for cotton, failure of Government education programmes, leaving the mostly illiterate farmers dependent on unscrupulous pesticides dealers for advice on managing crops; and most important, the collapse of the rural banking system; and short of cheap bank credit, farmers were forced to turn to moneylenders who charged, on average, 36 percent annual interest. Karp characterised this as 'economic booms dark side'.
Karp started with a narration of the journey to death by two farmers: One farmer's cotton crop had failed, ravaged by caterpillars, immune to pesticides that he sprayed frantically. He had already sold his two oxen to repay one loan and had nothing more to offer the usurious moneylenders who were hounding him for the $3,300 he owed, equal to two-and-a-half years earnings in good harvests.

The other farmer was deep in debt when pestilence descended: the well he dug for irrigation had collapsed three years ago, and two years of drought and irregular rains hurt his cotton yield, requiring greater investment in fertilizer and pesticides, at a time the wider cotton cultivation had driven down the market price.

A villager's suggestion to the farmer's illiterate widow, six months pregnant with their third child and saddled with debt, who sobbed as she threw herself on a visitors feet to beg for help, 'sell your oldest son to a landlord', pointing to the six-year-old, as bondage pays $80 a year cash upfront, is a telltale of how not only economic reforms but also the expected social democracy bypassed the rural poor to the advantage of the rich farmers, that too at a time when the nation was gloating over its success in abolishing bonded labour.

Pesticide Treadmill and Spurious Seed
Glenn Davis Stone's study (Stone 2002) is also of the distress-suicide syndrome of the cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, particularly the small and marginal. Stone attributed the culprit-cause of the farmers' distress to, what the farmers themselves stressed, the pesticide treadmill and spurious seed:

Cotton is the classic “pesticide treadmill” crop. Warangal farmers spend heavily on pesticides that are applied desperately and indiscriminately to combat a plethora of increasingly resistant pests. Warangal crops also fail because of “spurious seed”inferior cotton seed packaged as popular brands. Warangal farmers need much tighter regulation at the point-of-sale (the input vendors), but India's regulatory focus long has been at the other end of the seed system (approval and certification). This year, unapproved and illegal GM cotton (apparently developed with stolen germplasm) was found growing in Gujarat, prompting “corporate fury” and great pressure to increase regulation of production and distribution of seed. If this comes at the expense of the point-of-sale regulation that Warangal farmers need, the spurious seed problem will only get worse.

Larger Global Forces
Stone pointed out that there are much larger forces at work in Warangal, including the emergence of a global corporate agricultural oligarchy, the internationalisation of gene patenting and the poorly understood process of agricultural deskilling. The cascading effects of the working of this oligarchy on Indian villages should explain the second phase of the agrarian changes mentioned earlier.

Global Corporate Agricultural Oligarchy
What happened to Chandrababu Naidu's Bumbledom during the two terms (nine years) of governance by the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) led by him is a telltale. Paraphrased below is a critique of the World Bank's report, Andhra Pradesh: Agenda for Economic Reforms, and its use as the blueprint by Naidu for social engineering in Andhra Pradesh (Kumara 2004):

1. The report envisaged 80percent of the funds for Andhra Pradesh's economic reforms to be obtained from foreign sources, and the World Bank and DFID assumed the role of overseer of state policy. Among others, the report, World Bank and DFID urged the Naidu government the following:
2. Selling off to private investors of state-financed public sector enterprises (PSEs) which had long played a crucial socio-economic role in the state by providing employment, free medical care to their employees families, and lower-priced consumables in sectors such as dairy, transportation and electricity.
3. Elimination of all subsidies to agriculture, on which three quarters of the states 75 million people depend for their livelihood.
4. Forming a new agency called the Implementation Secretariat (IS), consisting of mainly expatriate British consultants from a right-wing British think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, as a way to bypass the state legislature.

At the instance of the IS, the Naidu government in the name of efficiency and infrastructure development promoted the commercial interests of IT hardware units, agribusiness companies (foreign financial institutes and international bankers), and biotechnology by heavily subsidising them. The process involved resorting to, among other things, the following:

1. Selling off public enterprises at bargain prices, which laid off thousands of workers through the “Voluntary” Retirement Scheme (VRS) for which the World Bank granted $26 million covering 70 percent of the estimated cost, with the remaining 30 percent coming from the state.
2. Splitting the integrated state-owned APEB (Andhra Pradesh Electricity Board) into separate generation, transmission and distribution companies with generation open to private competitionresulted in massive increase in electricity rates, provoking a huge backlash from June to August 2000 through agitations and demonstrations, which forced the government to a small rollback in rates and postpone further hikes.

Prepared and implemented the TDP government document, Vision 2020, the goals of which included the following:

1. Transforming Andhra Pradesh from a mainly agricultural state to a developed economy like Singapore by 2020, involving sustained investment totalling $750 billion over a 20 year period an amount several times greater than the total FDI inflow into all of India during the past decade. The central role in this transformation was assigned to information technology.
2. Transformation of agriculture by mechanization, which involved consolidation of smaller farms and 'contracting' them out to private corporations, pressuring the farmer into giving up their land to agribusinesses, supply of seeds and other inputs by private corporations to be 'repaid' by the farmers over a specified period, with the corporations owning the produce and paying the farmers wage for their labour, thereby transforming them into agricultural labourers; making farmers dependent on commercial seeds, thereby enriching trans-national seed companies and replacing the time-honoured practice of saving seeds from the previous harvest; reducing the number of farmers in the state to 40 percent of the population, without any significant programme to adequately rehabilitate the remaining 30 percent of the farming population.

Other States
The wide coverage of the agrarian distress in Andhra Pradesh by the national and international print and electronic media, and others, in particular the academics; and the relatively more elaborate account of it in this paper should not be construed as absence of agrarian distress in other states, or the distress has been limited to the cotton farmers.

Even in Andhra Pradesh cotton farmers have not been the only distress-farmers. As a report indicated, one of the striking features of changes in cropping pattern in Andhra Pradesh is that over a period of time the drought-prone Anantapur district, which is one of the two districts in the country having lowest rainfall, has almost become a mono-crop district. The crop is not cotton, but groundnut (70 percent), the area under which has increased steadily over the years. The fact that most of the farmers are not getting the Minimum Support Price (MSP), and are tied to traders and middlemen who are dealing in agricultural inputs, which depresses the price that farmers are to get for their output, combined with the present mono-culture of groundnut, has completely transformed socio-economic life of people, as resilience to drought is broken due to mono-culture. (Vidyasagar and Suman Chandra 2004)

If Andhra Pradesh became a focal point it is mainly for two reasons. The first is the early beginning and the severity of distress in it. The second is, a policy purported to be social engineering gone awry for more than a decade. Apart from Andhra Pradesh other states, and for that matter the rest of India, can learn valuable lessons for dismissing the dictates of the MNCs, the WTO, the GATS, the World Bank and other instruments of globalisation, which is only the new face of imperialism, and thus save the country from further ruin and the people from further distress and death.

While there is no comprehensive and authentic data on agrarian distress in different parts of the country, going by the media, and other sources, not all states have been under distress, and of the distress states, not all have been on the same level among themselves or as Andhra Pradesh. This is, however, no reason for complacence as globalisation has its own way of gobbling up the remaining states as well.

Going by available information, among other states agrarian distress has been intense in Karnataka since 2001, where the Congress ministry of S.M. Krishna did a Naidu, by following the World Bank model, and pumping in huge finances for its industry-driven agriculture; in Kerala, especially in Wayanad district, known for its cash crops, such as pepper, coffee, tea and cardamom; in Tamil Nadu (due to both drought and rain), in Maharashtra, especially in the cotton and Soya-bean growing region of Vidarbha, and in Punjab, in all of which farmers have been caught in a vicious cycle of crop failure, rising debt, chasing moneylenders, and persistent drought.

Distress and Suicide
While the foregoing sections may give an overall idea of the agrarian distress, its single most important cause has been the opening up of India's agrarian economy to global corporations in 1998, following the World Bank's structural adjustment policies. The effects of this are bound to be cascading. Some of these, which have only begun to unfold, have already been discussed. Probably the most eloquent critique of these policies has been by Vandana Shiva, in a number of important interventions and contributions. Her critique highlights the following7:

1. Replacing farm-saved seeds by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved. As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seed with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farm has become a commodity which farmers are forced to buy every year.
2. Increase in the risks of crop failure by the introduction of monocultures and uniformity as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of un-adapted and often untested seeds into the market.
3. Ruination of the viability of small farmers and small farms as a result of de-linking farming from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, the climate and linking it to global corporations and global markets, and replacing the generosity of the earth by the greed of global corporations. Debt is a reflection of a negative economy. Two factors have transformed the positive economy of agriculture into a negative economy for peasants - the rising costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalisation. Debt is a result of rising costs of agricultural inputs and falling prices of agricultural produce. Both the rising costs of production and decline in farm prices are intended outcomes of trade liberalization and economic reform policies driven by agribusiness corporations.
4. The industry-sponsored economic reforms are anti-poor. They have changed the way poor and illiterate farmers work their land, encouraging them to borrow heavily to sink wells, buy new high-yielding seeds or plant cash crops.
5. Drought is only a partial explanation for indebtedness and crop failure. The deregulated seeds untested for India's diverse soil and climatic conditions and rising costs of inputs are a major cause for crop failure and farm debt.
6. Deregulation of the input sector, the entry of seed MNCs and the creation of seed monopolies have increased the costs of inputs and the risks of crop failure.
   As other critics have also observed, the powerful pesticide lobby has been one of the chief promoters of the switch from sustainable, low-yielding traditional cultivation to cash crops like cotton which are susceptible to pests, and require frequent application of pesticides; the indiscriminate application of pesticides led to increased resistance in pests; as pests continue to ravage crops, desperate farmers used pesticides even more indiscriminately; and with suppliers offering pesticides on credit, expenses mounted and the noose tightened. With banks largely pulling out of farm lending; new commercial lenders charging 25-35 percent interest a year stalked the distress scenes. Often these same lenders sell supplies and services to the farmers, only to buy goods and equipment back from defaulters at exorbitant prices to recover their money. (Verma 1998)

Like others, Vandana Shiva attributed farmers' suicides to agrarian distress. In an open letter titled 'Why Farmers Suicide?' to the Finance Minister, and elsewhere, she dwelt at length on a variety of critical issues. At the risk of simplification some of these issues are summarised below:

Farmers' suicides are a result of indebtedness, an inevitable outcome of an agricultural policy, which favours corporate welfare and ignores farmers' welfare. Farmers' suicides cannot be blamed on nature and the rain. They cannot be stopped by asking states to assist banks for formulating new 'bankable investment project' like plantation and horticulture. Even in plantation and horticultural corps farmers' suicides have started. Every crop, every ecosystem is affected.

Despite wide publicity to agrarian distress and related suicides, no state has come forward with a reliable report on both. In this context, the statement by Kerala Agriculture minister, K.R. Gouri, as reported in the media on 21 September 2004, that the report on farmers' suicides to the Centre was not submitted because the state home department had not furnished the number of suicides, is appalling.

Nevertheless, if available data are any indication, the number of farmers who committed suicide was about 3,000 in Andhra Pradesh since 1997: 2,505 in 2001-02, 2,340 in 2002-03; and 708 in 2003-04 in Karnataka (Tukaram 2004); 173 in Kerala; 330 in Maharashtra; nearly 2,200 in Punjab (in 15 years since 1988); and 2 in Tamil Nadu (2004).

Larger Contexts
Though this paper has been concerned with agrarian distress and suicides, as neither distress nor suicide has been confined to the agrarian sector, and suicide is the extremity and not the only act of desperation, both should be placed in broader contexts.

In the context of Andhra Pradesh itself at least two issues are important to note. One, the devastation by Naidu's economic reforms of the traditional handloom industry, which had long provided employment to large number of worker-artisans; the distress caused by the inability of the weavers, who previously relied upon the state government for marketing and modernization, to compete with more modern power-looms; and unable to bear the distress hundreds have committed suicide. (Kumara 2004; Sharma 2004) Two, starvation deaths because of lack of work in the villages forcing the small farmers and agricultural labourers either to migrate or starve to death. (Sharma 2004)

The observation in the context of Karnataka that in the aftermath of the mid-1960s Green Revolution community farming became extinct and life became an every-man-for-himself contest, is equally applicable to other states, (Tukaram 2004). The overall capability-deprivation of the villagers, with many reduced to penury and starvation, and some persisting with life by selling their kidneys, add additional dimensions to agrarian distress.

As both agrarian distress and suicides are social problems, sui generis, and also related to one another, and the former has already been widely discussed, the latter calls for more attention. However, the statistical information on suicides is so skimpy and badly put together that it does not permit any meaningful analysis.

What is important to note in this context is the central thesis of Durkheim's classic work of 1897 (Durkheim 1979) that the suicide rate is a phenomenon sui generis; that is, the totality of suicides in a society is a fact separate, distinct, and capable of study in its own terms, and the related postulates: What looks like a highly individual and personal phenomenon is explicable through the social structure and its ramifying functions. The stronger the forces throwing the individual onto his own resources, the greater the suicide-rate in the society in which this occurs. A given number of suicides are to be expected in a given type of society. But where the rate increases rapidly, it is symptomatic of the breakdown of the collective conscience, and of a basic flaw in the social fabric.

Whether the suicides caused by agrarian distress are within the Durkheimian framework is debatable. Durkheim might not have anticipated globalisation and the forces unleashed by it in different parts of the world, which are socially disruptive. As the disruption caused by globalisation inflicts basic flaws in society, the social construction of suicides needs to be taken beyond the Durkeimian framework.

The emergence of new deleterious institutional features in society represents the associational features of suicides and as agencies which have hastened the farmers as individuals into the suicide traps. As these features impinge on the newly emerging agrarian relations both within and outside the agrarian sector the related phenomenon of suicides is best understood within a combination of the Durkeimian framework and the framework of the political economy of agrarian relations.

If, as observed by Karp in the essay mentioned earlier, 'more broadly, the suicides betray a breakdown of everything India needs to modernize agriculture: education, supervision of technology, finance, investment and more-equitable markets, the remedy to prevent the suicides is to address this break-down. Unlike in Durkheim's time with the unsettling effects of globalisation on the basic existential conditions of individuals in society, the concepts of life and death take on a very different meaning: When the notion of suicide becomes a relatively accepted way out of the extreme distressful and hopeless condition of life, and ending life becomes a way of life, one should also turn to the philosophical issue raised by the existentialist Camus.

While on suicide, one might as well ask, why Tamil Nadu, which is otherwise more prone to suicide, thanks to the cinematic chicanery of M.G. Ramachandran, and has a higher suicide rate along with Karnataka and Kerala, has had minimal number of suicides despite its agrarian distress of the last four years; and the remaining states have a lower suicide rate than even Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. The probable answer to the first is that the killer cotton, which struck deep roots in Andhra Pradesh, has yet to strike roots in Tamil Nadu. The probable answer to the second calls for further exploration, inasmuch as the lower rate of suicide in them cannot be linked to their backwardness, as Punjab is an economically and agriculturally advanced state where the suicide rate is the lowest.

Conclusion
In the traditional Indian society, villagers, in particular the farmers had developed enough resilience to adversities, whether natural or man-made. Even at the height of landlordism - from the 1930s to the early 1970s in some states farmers mobilised themselves, took on the landlords and the establishment supporting them, and often turned militant in their action. One might ask whatever happened to that strong tradition of collective identity and collective action. In this context the earlier reference that in the aftermath of the mid-1960s Green Revolution, community farming became extinct and life became an every-man-for-himself contest assumes great significance.

The resilience was also partly because of the nature of the village set-up. Despite its discriminatory, exclusionary, and exploitative nature, the jajmani system (Wiser 1988) through its collective communal identity carried and conveyed the importance of life as worth living no matter whether the person was high or low in society. No doubt, in modern context, and in keeping with India's democratic ethos, the system requires thorough cleansing for correcting the aberrations and distortions in it.

Under the traditional system, farmers spent less on cultivation as they had their own seed banks, used organic fertilizers, and grew crops that did not require as much water, and were thus relatively less dependent on moneylenders to harvest their next crop and buy their next meal. A bad monsoon season made their lives more difficult, but they managed. (Tukaram 2004)

If the MNCs have their way and say in India despite opposition by the people, it is mainly because the governments at the Centre and in states have turned compradors of the imperialist instruments. The repeated exhortations by politicians and those in high places to farmers and other sections (such as education) of society to prepare themselves to face the challenges of globalisation, with dispiriting effect on the people only embolden the MNCs8.

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Dr P. Radhakrishnan is a professor at Madras University

References

• Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Agriculture. Mumbai. 2004.
• Durkheim, Emile. [1897] 1979. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• India at 50: Facts, Figures and Analyses, 1947-1997. Chennai. Express Publications (Madurai) Ltd. 1997.
• Kumara, Kranti. 2004. 'India: Behind the Rout of the Telugu Desam Party - A Portrait of World Bank Social Engineering'. Asian Tribune. 12 June.
• Sharma, Devinder. 2004. 'India's Agrarian Crisis: No End to Farmers Suicides'. 28 June ZNet | South Asia.
• Shiva, Vandana, Jafri, A.H, Emani, A. and Pande, M. 2002. Seeds of Suicide: The Ecological and Human Costs of Globalization of Agriculture. Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi. (Revised edition of 2000 book by same name.)
• Shiva, Vandana. 2001. “India: Corporatisation of Agriculture Disastrous. The Guardian, 7 March.
• Shiva, Vandana. 2000. Stolen Harvest: The High jacking of the Global Food Supply. Boston: South End Press.
• Shiva, Vandana, Emani, Ashok and Jafri, A.H. 1999. Globalisation and Threat to Seed Security: Case of Transgenic cotton trials in India. Economic and Political Weekly. 34 (10): 601-613.
• Srinivas, M.N. 1992. On Living in a Revolution and Other Essays. Delhi. Oxford University Press.
• Stern, W. Robert. 1993. Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent. New Delhi. Foundation Books.
• Stone. Glenn Davis. 2002. 'Biotechnology and Suicide in India'. Anthropology News. Vol. 43 No. 5, May.
• Tukaram, Sarita.2004. 'Farmers' Suicide Epidemic Shatters Southern India' 17 May. North Gate News Online. http://journalism.berkeley.edu/ngno/stories/003628.html
• Verma, Jitendra. 1998. 'Cotton, Pesticides and Suicides'. Earth Island Journal. Fall.
• Vidyasagar, R.M. and Suman Chandra, K. 2004. 'Debt Trap or Suicide Trap?' Countercurrents.org. 20 June.

End Notes

1. Revised version of a paper presented at the seminar `Agrarian Distress and Farmers' Suicides in India', held at the Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, from 24 to 26 February 2005, under the Governance and Policy Spaces Project (GAPS Project), located at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad. I am grateful to Professor D. Sundaram for his valuable comments on the draft of this paper.
2. According to the Census 2001, out of India's population of 1027 million about 742 million or 72.2 percent live in rural areas, in 587226 villages.
3. India at 50: Facts, Figures and Analyses, 1947-1997. Chennai. Express Publications (Madurai) Ltd., 1997. P. 76.
4. 'The saga of the Green Revolution has been a subject of intense debate, both within and outside the country. In spite of significant strides in agricultural production, the new strategy has invoked criticism on the ground that it was biased in favour of the better-endowed parts of the country. The dry land tract, contributing the bulk of coarse grains, pulses, oil seeds, cotton and groundnut, has remained largely untouched by the gains of the strategy'. India at 50. Ibid.
5. The classification of the farmers is into marginal, small, semi-medium, medium, and large. The five corresponding size-classes of holdings are below 1 ha, 1-2 ha, 2-4 ha, 4-10 ha, and 10 ha and above. The figures used in the text are from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Agriculture, February 2004.
6. The figures used in the text are from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Agriculture, February 2004.
7. The views of Vandana Shiva are culled from her different contributions, which are necessarily repetitive. Some of the sources used are mentioned in the References.
8. The Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy's exhortation to farmers to prepare themselves to face the challenges of globalisation, as reported in the press on 21 September 2004, is a case in point. Coming as it does from a state with a long tradition of peasant mobilisation and rule by Left parties; it is difficult to expect better wisdom from politicians in other states.
9. The rate is per lakh population.