Farmer Suicides in India: Background information when reading The Lives of Others

Farmer Suicides in India

This article relates to The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others begins with a shocking murder suicide. A farmer, Nitai Das, kills his children and wife and then himself, out of sheer desperation resulting from abject poverty and hunger. The book's protagonist, Supratik Ghosh, decides to move to rural West Bengal, to help the plight of farmers caught in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.

While farming is an occupation where the suicide rate is already high, it is especially so in India. Between 2001 and 2011, a yearly average of 16,743 deaths by suicide were recorded in farming communities.

Many factors, some broad and others specific, have been labeled as contributing to this epidemic. The liberalization of the Indian economy in the '90s lead to the country's booming economy, but those same globalization factors, combined with a peeling back of state-support systems, brought significant damage to the farming infrastructure. Farmers working small plots of land, lured by the promise of cash crops like cotton and coffee, incurred heavy losses with the wild fluctuations of the commodities on the global market. Climate change has exacerbated the problem. In a profession that was already ruled by the reliability of the Indian monsoon, drought, and delayed or scanty rains, have wreaked havoc on the land.

Among the most controversial of the various factors that have been blamed for farmers' suicides has been the introduction of genetically modified cotton seeds from Monsanto. Widely touted as disease-free and promising to increase yields, farmers embraced the new seeds while getting into debt (the Monsanto seeds were much more expensive). They entered into a dangerous cycle of monoculture, which depletes the land of essential nutrients. Worse, on the global markets, these poor Indian farmers, with their cotton cash crops, have to compete with counterparts elsewhere who enjoy heavy government subsidies on their crops. While there's plenty of blame to spread around, the solutions have been hard to come by. The Monsanto factor has created heated debates on both sides, with some claiming that it is fashionable to blame a multinational when the problem is much more multi-faceted and deep-rooted and began even before the Monsanto seeds showed up in India.

The arguments against genetically modified crops and globalization have been the catalyst for Indian activist Vandana Shiva, who has been hailed as a vociferous campaigner for a more simple way of farming. She has accused multinational corporations such as Monsanto of imposing "food totalitarianism" on the world. While her views have not sat down well with many, she is seen as a champion both by farmers in India and in the left-leaning portions of the West, although not without a few misgivings as a 2014 New Yorker profile showed.

A group bringing attention to Farmer Suicide in India, courtesy of Yann
A farmer ploughs his field with oxen, courtesy of Steven Walling
Farms in rural India, courtesy of Lisa.davis

Filed under Society and Politics

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Lives of Others. It originally ran in November 2014 and has been updated for the September 2015 paperback edition. Go to magazine.