Statistically, Odisha showed up nationally as a State where the issue of distressed farmers’ suicide is not worrisome, though ground realities are quite different. The 2014 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report on farmer suicides delivered the startling news when it listed Odisha among the States recording below double digit farmer suicides.
According to the report, the State recorded mere five farmer suicides in 2014. Interestingly, purely farming-led distressed suicide in Odisha is just one. Of the remaining, three of them were attributed to family problems with one being characterised as suicide owing to property dispute. Statistically looking, this appears a great development for agrarian Odisha because the suicides clocked a humungous 97 per cent fall compared to their incidence in 2013.
Moreover, this seems a record-of-sort achievement for the Government in over a decade and a half (since 1997). This, despite 2014 having witnessed widespread agitations on farm-related issues ranging from distressed sale to crop losses as revealed by the White Paper of the Home Department.
Farmer leaders in State are not ready to buy the data. Farmer leader Akshay Kumar labelled it a ‘manufactured’ data as he claimed in January – June 2015 as many as two dozens of alleged suicides by farmers occurred in different districts in Odisha. In January 2015, Bargarh district alone recorded five farmer suicides in ten-days. “Paddy share-croppers were reaping huge losses due to distress sale and being indebted to private lenders they took the extreme step to avoid torture,” he averred.
Significantly, when suicides by the salaried/professionals and self-employed in the State recorded a rise, distressed farmer suicides alone notched a stupendous fall. However, a look at the detailed data brings forth a new story as the NCRB report has stated that a whopping 102 suicides were recorded in the category of self-employed in agriculture of which, farmer suicides were five. Above all, the State recorded as high as 97 suicides by agricultural labourers last year. Thus, the cumulative suicides recorded under the category self-employed in agriculture in Odisha in 2014 totals to a whopping 199 against 150 recorded under the same ‘heading’ in 2013.
Further, the report revealed that all the five farmer suicides were reported from the category of small farmers tilling their own land. What befuddle agro experts in Odisha are the reported suicides by ‘self-employed’ people in ‘agriculture’. According to latest NSSO report, a whopping 57% of households in Odisha are engaged in farming or are self- employed in agriculture. Incidentally, over a half of them are share-croppers, reveals the agriculture census data.
An analysis of NCRB data shows that a small farmer owning a landcommitted suicide in 2014 in State due to indebtedness. This shows indebtedness is killing farmers in Odisha too and the incidence of indebtedness in Odisha is as high as 57 per cent (2013-14) as per NSSO data. The moot question then is how a share-cropper can withstand the whirlpool of indebtedness in State, who usually borrows from private money-lenders at exorbitant interest rates. Moreover, Odisha has only a handful of agro venture capitalists.