Shri Advaniji's letter to PM demanding JPC on farmers' suicide

Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister of India
7 Race Course Road
New Delhi

    Subject: Demand for setting up a Joint Parliamentary Committee on large-scale farmers’ suicides in various states

Dear Dr. Manmohan Singhji,

I am writing this letter to you on a subject of utmost national importance – large-scale farmers’ suicides in various states. And I am writing it from Yavatmal district in Vidarbha (Maharashtra), which has witnessed the largest number of farmers’ suicides in the state. I have come to Pandharkauda village in this district in the course of my 35-day Bharat Suraksha Yatra, which my Party President Shri Rajnath Singh and I have jointly undertaken.

Soon after entering the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra from Adilabad in Andhra Pradesh, I visited Sunni village in Yavatmal district where three farmers committed suicide in the past one year. I conveyed my condolences to members of the bereaved families. In my discussions with them, I found that in all the three cases the cause of suicide was indebtedness and collapse in the prices of farm produce. I was also told about reluctance on the part of the administration to register cases of suicide.

In the past few years, I have read reports in the media about a large number of distressed farmers in different states committing suicide. The reports were no doubt shocking. But my travels through the villages and towns in Vidarbha and the relatively advanced districts of Maharashtra, and the Rayalaseema and Telengana regions of Andhra Pradesh, which are among the most backward in the entire country, have convinced me that the reality of large-scale farmers’ suicide is far more numbing and appalling than can be gauged from media reports in New Delhi. I also heard tales of farmers’ suicides even in Kerala, where I had gone a few days ago to participate in my party’s campaign for the ensuing election campaign. Previously, my Party colleagues have apprised me of farmers’ suicides in Punjab too.

The extent of this grave new phenomenon can be realized from the numbers being mentioned by reliable media reports, which are broadly corroborated by independent studies conducted by my Party colleagues in the affected states. Thus, nearly 4,000 farmers have reportedly committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh alone. In Maharashtra, the number is said to be around 1,000. Even in a small state like Kerala, as many as 150 farmers, mainly in Wynad district, have reportedly committed suicide.

You will agree that a human being takes the extreme step of ending his/her own life only when the distress goes beyond the limits of bearing. Even then, suicide is almost always an individual act, confined to person-specific or family-specific factors. But I cannot think of any other time in recent Indian history when suicide became a mass act, caused by societal factors and governmental policies affecting large numbers of people simultaneously. It is also notable that extreme distress today is not limited to cultivators of any particular crop. During my Yatra, I have come across cases of cotton-growers, onion-growers, sugarcane-growers, grape-growers, groundnut-growers, soya-growers and other categories of farmers committing suicide. It is extremely agonizing that annadata (provider of food) has himself become asurakshit (insecure) in a country where the kisan has always been accorded the pride of place, where a majority of the population still lives in rural areas and continues to be dependent on agriculture.

I believe that Parliament, which is the country’s highest forum of democracy, cannot remain indifferent to the full-blown crisis of farmers’ suicides in several states. It is for this reason that I have declared in my public meetings during the Bharat Suraksha Yatra that the BJP would seek the setting up of a Joint Parliamentary Committee on farmers’ suicides, when the Budget session re-commences on May 10. I am convinced that the states cannot be left to their own devices to tackle this crisis. An effective, urgent and well-coordinated central-state intervention is needed. And only a JPC, suitably advised by experts and officials, can do justice to this need by studying the problem in its multiple dimensions (repeated crop failure, extreme volatility in prices of farm produce, inability to meet the rising cost of cultivation, breakdown of institutional credit, and growing indebtedness, mostly to private usurious money-lenders) and making appropriate remedial recommendations – both immediate-term and long-term. It should be the collective endeavour of the central and state governments to ensure that not a single Indian farmer is forced to commit suicide due to occupational distress.

I am writing this letter in the hope that your government will readily accept the idea of a JPC on farmers’ suicides when I propose it in Parliament next month.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

(L.K. Advani)