Farmers in India face immense challenges including financial difficulties, crop failures due to monsoon variability and lack of irrigation, high interest rates for loans, and increasing costs of farming. As a result, thousands of farmers commit suicide each year - on average 38 suicides per day or one every 30 minutes. The majority of these suicides are by small or medium farmers who are in debt. To address this crisis, experts call for increased access to affordable credit, comprehensive crop insurance, irrigation investments, and programs to provide alternative livelihoods for farmers.

1. Presented by
J.Vishnu
RT/2016/604
Farmers suicides in India

2. Contents
 Who is a farmer ?
 Farmers’ Suicide statistics
 Common features in majority of suicides
 Reasons behind the farmer suicides
 Impact of Suicides
 What government can do?

3. Who is a farmer ?
 Farmer is a back bone of India.
 A farmer (also called an Agriculturer )
o Is a person engaged in agriculture,
raising living organisms for food or raw
materials
o A farmer might own the farmed land or
might work as a laborer on land owned
by others.

4. Reasons For Suicide
 Stress factors such as financial difficulties or troubles with interpersonal
relationships often play a role.

5. Farmers’ Suicide statistics
 On an average 38 farmers commit suicide everyday in India, one Indian
farmer commits suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005 and
since 2012, this has become one suicide every 30 minutes.
 1803 women farmers committed suicide in 2012.
 13754 farmers committed suicide in the country in 2012.
 Almost 75 per cent of farmer suicides have occurred amongst the small
and medium farmers.
 Indebtedness was the reason behind the suicide of 93% farmers.

6. Common features in majority of suicides
 91-94 % of suicides are by family heads.
 91-97 % of those who committed suicide are males.
 84 to 89 percent are married.
 86.5 percent of farmers who took their own lives were financially indebted.

8. Drought
 The most immediate consequence of drought is a fall in crop
production, due to inadequate and poorly distributed rainfall.

9. Monsoons
 Farmers in India over dependence on the monsoons.
 There is regular break down in the meteorological cycle of rainfall,.
 In India, 93% of area fall under dry land farming, which means totally
dependent on the rainfall as irrigation systems are scarce, not equally
spread and are not efficient
 Sometimes more than normal rains causes flood which also destroys the
crop.

10. Lack of proper irrigation
 Indian farmers are heavily dependent on monsoons,. They don’t have
any source for proper irrigation farming. Irrigation farming is when crops
are grown with the help of irrigation systems by supplying water to land
through rivers, reservoirs, tanks, and wells.
 58% of farmers having committed suicides had absolutely no irrigation
facilities.

11. Groundwater
 Due to overdependence on groundwater for all purposes domestic or
industrial
 Ground water table is decreasing at an alarming rate.
 Many farmers due to lack of proper irrigation systems, use tube wells and are
now facing problems due to it.

12. Lack of power supply
 Many tasks related to agriculture are
power/electric dependent.
 Costly or no electricity supply proves to a
significant problem.

13. Girl child
 Dowry is still present in many parts of India.
 Dowry creates financial pressure on the family head.

14. Indebtedness
 Indebtedness was the reason behind the suicide of 93% farmers.
 Out of 17.64 Lakh farmers only (25.3%) farmers could avail institutional
finance in 2005-06.
 Private money lenders charge high interest rates between 48-60% p.a.
 Higher rate of interest in the co-operative credit system e.g. up to
12.5% to 14% till last year.
 Cooperative sector brought down their interest rates to 7%, even then
the farmers are taking loans from the private individuals.

15. Crop failure
 There are many different reasons for crop failure
 Late Monsoon
 Heavy Monsoon
 Pests, Insects
 Climate Change
 Drought

16. Impact of Suicides
 Suicides leads to loss of sole bread winner in the family.
 It causes a lot of psychological distress to family.
 Impact on children’s education.
 Other family members attempting suicides.
 Children sometimes lose both parents to suicide, forcing their
education to a halt, especially if they have to work in order to
provide for their needs.
 The families moves from farmers to permanent labor.

17. Preventive measures
 Provide financial literacy ( how to use credit, work out on cost-benefit
analysis of investment, risk coping mechanism i.e., insurance – crop
& life, increasing savings).
 Focus on creating alternate livelihoods.
 Encourage multiple cropping.
 Generate awareness on pesticide usage.
 Provide timely government input subsidy to the farmers.
 Provide quality of seeds.
 Government in advance should state the premium price for the crops.

18. What government can do?
 Addressing Root Causes
 Bank credit to all farmers with adequate scale of finance
 Effective crop insurance to cover all crops and all farmers
 Inclusion of tenant farmers in all support systems