Aid sought to arrest India farm suicides

Efforts to boost income and provide easier access to markets and technologies are among the proposals to help Indian farmers and reduce rural suicide cases, analysts said.

Driven by a "resurgence of suicide psychosis", many farmers operating with continual losses and no relief in sight believe that killing themselves is the only escape route, said PC Bodh, senior economic adviser to India's Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare, speaking in a personal capacity.

About 50 percent of India's 1.3 billion people work in the farm sector. But farming contributes only 15 percent to India's GDP, revealing a grave economic and social disorder in the system, said Bodh, author of Farmers' Suicides in India: A Policy Malignancy.

Every year, large groups of farmers gather in major cities across India to call for drought relief, loan waivers or compensation for crop losses. Between 1995 and 2015, more than 321,400 debt-ridden cultivators and farm workers across India committed suicide, according to government data.

According to Ashok Gulati, a leading agricultural economist, the high rate of suicides proves the country is unable to absorb the surplus labor.

"The only way to make their lives better is to create an ecosystem that will not only allow them easy and direct access to markets and latest technologies, but will also remove the unnecessary layers of intermediaries," said Gulati, Infosys chair of agriculture at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

The government has announced income support of 6,000 rupees ($84) annually to any farm family with land ownership. The average income of marginal farmers, who constitute 67 percent of the total, is very low. For the 2015-2016 fiscal year, the average monthly income of an agricultural household in India was 8,931 rupees.

In 2016, before seeking a second term in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double farmers' income by 2022, with 2015 being the reference year.

"That's a pipe dream," Gulati said. "In order to make that really happen, we need to make sure farmers' income rises 13-15 percent every year. In the present scenario, such a possibility looks bleak."

Gulati observed that farm distress is not the sole reason for farmers' suicides, even though there is no doubt that the sector is afflicted with widespread hopelessness.