Coming back today after seeing Aamir Khan Productions' Peepli [Live], I rejoiced in the fact that finally we have cracked the art of showing serious issues of village life in commercial cinema and not leaving it to documentaries which the mass never views. I am not a movie reviewer or critic so won't go into the details of the moviemaking. But the movie touched upon a topic that I wished to make a documentary of in 2008 but never did. Never did I imagine that it could become the topic of a movie and that too made so creatively as to make it so gripping. Of course I don't say it has not been done. In fact Swades too was a touching and inspiring movie on rural India. But this beats all of them as the hero was the farmer with no Aamir or Shah Rukh Khan... and no romance, no songs!
I then came back home and decided to reproduce the blog I had written in 2008 when farmer suicides had reached their peak. This was after reading the book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Below is the blog of 2008.
Understanding the Tipping Point of farmer suicides.
The entire last week was spent in asking or answering the logic behind the finance minister’s Rs. 60,000 crore debt waiver for farmers.
The reasons ranged from bailing out banks, starting afresh both for banks and farmers, compensating farmers for suffering the hardships of a weak agricultural system.
But the bigger question is never answered – is it going to stop farmer suicides?
Lets take the region with the largest number of farmer suicides - The Vidarbha region of Maharashtra where one may hear of a suicide each day of the week.
So where did it all start for Vidarbha? - What triggered these suicides in the first place? It started over a decade ago. Farmers in RICH cotton growing Vidarbha were made poor by the government’s pricing policy, which failed to get them a market price for their cotton. Thus began their financial woes.
Sharad Joshi, a well known spokesman of farmers movement says that farmers can stand a certain level of indebtedness, what they have difficulty in withstanding is PUBLIC HUMILIATION AND SOCIAL STIGMA heaped on them by certain types of creditors – these being co-operative bank recovery officials.
Okay we know the start, so what course did the government follow - Not difficult to answer - financial packages or dole outs.
In June 2004, the UPA government announced a package for the entire country comprising rescheduling of repayment of outstanding debt over five years with two year moratorium, rescheduling of loans in default, fresh credit for ineligible farmers and such other schemes.
What was the impact – suicides from 2004 and now have merely increased.
So the government decided it needed to intervene again with another financial package - Our PM visited Vidarbha region and announced a package of Rs. 3,750 crore in July 2006.
So as of date around Rs. 30,000 crore or so farm loans have been rescheduled under various schemes.
Surprisingly financial packages never give us an understanding of the co-relation of financial packages to farmer suicides. Did the package in July 2006 help reduce suicides in Vidarbha?
All this brings me to the chapter on suicides in the book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.. He talks of a South Pacific island Micronesia where a seventeen year old boy got into an argument with his father, father told him to get out of the house and he then committed suicide. For an island where suicide was unknown in 1960s, by the end of 1980s there were more suicides per capita in Micronesia than anywhere else in the world.
The book says - The central observation of those who study suicide is that in some places and under some circumstances, the act of one person taking his or her own life can be contagious. Suicides lead to suicides. Thus as suicide grows more frequent in these communities the idea itself acquires a certain familiarity if not fascination (to young men in the case of Micronesia) and the lethality of the act seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide act appears to have acquired an experimental almost recreational element”
It concludes with - AN ACT THAT HAS BECOME AN IMPORTANT FORM OF SELF EXPRESSION” – people who die in highly publicized suicides – whose deaths give others “permission to die” serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics. – is it then for our Vidarbha farmers?
Well our government only understands financial packages and all we can do is see if Rs. 60,000 crore is the answer to cease farmer suicides.