Agrarian Distress in India: An Assessment of Trend, Causes and Lasting Solutions

M. Yesurajan¹

Section:Research Paper, Product Type: Isroset-Journal
Vol.4 , Issue.10 , pp.12-17, Oct-2018

Online published on Oct 31, 2018

Copyright © M. Yesurajan . This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 

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Abstract :
Agriculture regarded as the base of Indian economy and regardless of deliberate industrialization over the most recent decades agriculture sector possesses a position of pride. Being the biggest sector in the nation it gives livelihoods to around 65% of the aggregate workforce in the nation. Aside from the effective development throughout the decades, Indian agriculture is confronting genuine difficulties, for example, stagnation of agriculture sector and farmer`s suicide. The study is an attempt to understand the trend and the causes of farmer suicide in India. The study entirely relay on secondary sources of data. The primary source of data for analyzing the phenomenon of farmer suicides in India is the Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India (ADSI), an annual publication of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. The period of data on farmer’s suicide was collected from 1995 to 2015. The study found that during 1995-15, 321407 farmers conferred suicide in India. This demonstrating the death of at least one farmer in every 30 minutes. In the vicinity of 1995 and 2015, the NCRB revealed 321407 farmers` suicides, which is 13.10 per cent of all announced suicide death. From all reported farmers’ suicides, 83.92 per cent are males and 14.65 per cent are females. Bankruptcy or indebtedness and farming related issues’ are the major causes of suicides among farmers/cultivators, accounting for 38.7 per cent and 19.5 per cent of total such suicides respectively during 2015. The other prominent causes of farmer/cultivators suicides were family problems, illness and drug abuse/alcoholic addiction, accounting for 11.7 per cent, 10.5 per cent and 4.1 per cent of total farmers/cultivators suicides respectively. The study suggesting that providing formal credit facilities to farmers is the appropriate solution to solve indebtness related suicide of farmers and extend crop insurance to all farmers will enable them to avoid huge loss due to climate change.

Key-Words / Index Term :
Farmer’s distress, trend of suicide, Causes, Remedies

References :
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AUTHORS PROFILE
Mr. M. Yesurajan is currently working as Assistant Professor in Department of Economics at The American College, Madurai, Tamil Nadu. He is pursuing Ph.D. economics at School of Economics, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai. He has published a number of research papers in reputed international and national journals. His main research work focuses on the health status of workers in the transportation sector.