India: West Bengal govt attributes farm suicides to mental depression

30 farmers have committed suicide in the Indian state of West Bengal, the latest case being that of a 17 year-old Safar Molla. Two-thirds of these have been reported from Burdwan district, the state’s rice bowl.

The majority have been paddy farmers. Potato cultivators including share croppers and agricultural labourers have also committed suicide.

Farmers in Burdwan complain that a lack of infrastructure like cold stores has led to wastage of their produce. This was resulting in a financial burden of farming households. Reports have also come in of farmers setting their produce ablaze protesting the lack of storage facilities.

The state government, however, denies that farmers are killing themselves due to any financial distress that could be rectified by the state’s intervention.

West Bengal’s food and supplies minister, Jyotipriyo Mullick, attributed the spate of suicides to mental depression, not because of any financial quagmire they faced. Of all the instances of farmer suicide, the state government has acknowledged only one case so far. “How can we be responsible for the personal loans that the farmers have taken for priorities other than farming,” the minister was quoted as having said in the business newspaper, Business Line.

“Farmers should not be shown in bad light.... that they are very poor. Farmers in Burdawan have 100 bigha of land,” the fortnightly India Today magazine quoted Mullick as saying on its website. (2.5 bighas to an acre).

Terming the reports of farmers’ suicides incorrect, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has rejected a proposal of a probe by an all-party team into the matter. This has given a handle to opposition legislators.

“We told her it should be ascertained whether such suicides were due to the distress sale of paddy and other agricultural produce by the farmers in different parts of the state,” Communist Party of India (CPI) legislator from Midnapore, Prabodh Panda, said after a meeting legislators had with the Chief Minister.

Media reports have quoted the Chief Minister, who rode to power on her slogan of Maa-Mati-Manush (Mother-Soil-People) as denying that farmers are dying because they are not getting a fair price for their produce.

But the state’s Governor M K Narayanan has also admitted that “farmers’ suicides were taking place and some of the peasants were debt ridden.”

Indicators point otherwise: The state government has not achieved its paddy procurement target of two million tonnes. This must be seen in light of a bumper harvest estimated above 15 million tonnes.

“With the government’s failure to buy substantial amounts of paddy, the middlemen who sell the paddy to the rice mills are having a field day. The bumper production has only added to the farmers’ woes. The market prices have fallen to Rs.600 a quintal, forcing the farmers who had taken loans for the paddy cultivation to go for distress sale at low prices,” noted economist, Dipankar Dasgupta, was quoted as having said.

Meanwhile, reports have also come in of starvation deaths of workers from tea gardens in the state’s north – nine workers from Jalpaiguri’s Dheklapara tea estate have died of starvation. The workers were on a relief allowance since closure of the tea estate in 2001. But they haven’t got any allowance since June, 2011.