This book locates the malignant causes behind the factors leading to farmers’ suicides in India. It argues that not only a combination of innovative managerial and economic policies is required to make farming profitable, but also food production within the carrying capacity of soil, water, forests and economic and social resources must still be maintained. It brings together diverse themes, such as farming development and suicide statistics, as well as the developmental inertia evident in farmers’ welfare policy history. The book stresses the need to go beyond the narrow crop economics of minimum support price utility and towards recognizing the farm household economic nature of farming, reinventing the uniqueness of farmers as a productive class engaged in converting cosmic elements into food and adopting the budgetary support approach to bail out the farmers from the suicidal, debt-multiplying, production support approach. Lucid and topical, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, political sociology, agricultural economics, political economy, public policy, sociology, agrarian and rural development studies, as also to policy analysts, governmental bodies and civil society activists.

Agrarian distress in the era of globalization has manifested in the suicides of farmers and agricultural labourers. This book, using empirical research and field data from north India, especially Punjab, examines the different facets of this tragic phenomenon in rural India. Situating Indian agriculture in the context of globalization it looks at the underlying causes of farmer suicides in a state that was the model of modern capitalist agriculture and development. It also attempts to understand why other farmers have chosen not to take the same path. With a comparative framework and coverage of nearly 1400 rural households, it brings out the brutal manifestation of this complex and multidimensional situation in the Indian countryside. Topical, comprehensive and rich in data, this book will be valuable to scholars and researchers of political economy, agricultural economics, South Asian politics, political sociology, and public policy.

This volume is the twelfth in the series ‘Land Reforms in India’. The essays in this volume bring out the multi-dimensional aspects of the agrarian crisis, and its impact on farmers’ suicides leading to public policy. A distinctive feature of this collection is its holistic approach towards viewing farm sector distress, instead of looking for isolated causes and solutions.

Farmers' suicides' have been typically framed through official statistics and they have been explained in terms of agrarian economic distress. This book revises and extends such explanations on the basis of ethnographic work in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh. It describes spatially grounded transformations taking place in the domains of production, consumption, social relationships, and gender identities in south India today. Its focus is on exploring how these interconnected transformations-and their engendered, emotional experiences-set the context for understanding suicidal behavior in a particular location. The understanding that 'farmers' suicides' are objectively, uniformly, and exclusively marked by 'farm-related' factors are thus interrogated. The book concludes by suggesting that 'farmers' suicides' are motivationally related to the wider field of rural suicides. Overall, the book contends that rural suicides relate to emerging mentalities and interactions around status, equality, and honour in contemporary India.

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the macro- and micro-level issues associated with agrarian distress. It analyses structural, institutional, and policy changes, highlighting the failure of public support system in agriculture. The crisis manifests itself in the form of deceleration in growth and distress of farmers. The case studies from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Punjab bring out the diversity of conditions prevalent in the states.