Agricultural distress and farmers suicide in India

India is an agrarian country with around 50% of its people directly or indirectly depends upon agriculture. Agriculture in India is often attributed as gambling with monsoons because of its almost exclusive dependency on precipitation from monsoons. The failure of these monsoons leading to a series of droughts, lack of better prices, exploitation by Middlemen, all of which have led to a series of suicides committed by farmers across India. There is a wide array of factors that has led to the increasing spate of farmer suicides in India. The lands are not as productive as before, the markets are failing, the debts are piling up, and the pests cannot be kept at bay. More than an economic problem, this has now assumed political and humanitarian dimensions, especially since the past decade. Hence nowadays the suicidal tendency among farmers’ who are supposed to be the back bone of Indian society is the subject of concern. Considering the paramount importance of this issue, the NCRB (National Crime Record Bureau), for the first time in 2014, has collected detailed data on farmers’ suicides. With this backdrop the present study going to make an analysis of the farmers’ suicide in India. This paper examines the causes of farmers’ suicide in India from different perspectives and the results have some policy implications.