Farmer suicide deaths make harvest in the backwaters of Bengal

Yet another farmer having committed suicide now in Burdwan district, the rice bowl of West Bengal, taking the toll to nine in the last two months.

Predictably, there are two versions of this tragedy. The bereaved family insists that Amiya Saha (of Rajpur village in Memari) killed himself yesterday after having failed to sell his paddy and thus pay back the loan he had taken from the village moneylender. The local administration claims Saha was suffering from kidney ailments caused by diabetes. Also, “he had gone into acute depression. These led to his suicide,” according to district magistrate Omkar Singh Meena.

In the last two months, eight farmers committed suicide in Burdwan district, while the ninth such incident was reported from North Bengal’s Coocbehar district. The state administration continues to deny any case of farmers’ suicide, even as there are sporadic cases of farmers’ agitation in the rural Bengal. There, in some cases, the farmers have taken the extreme steps of burning the paddy to draw attention to their plight.

Farmers’ agitations led by the Left bloc and the Congress party are continuing in the districts. Tomorrow, Left-affiliated peasants’ organisations are observing a strike in rural Bengal. The announcement has failed to get a positive response from chief minister Mamata Banerjee, indicating that the Trinamool Congress government has little or no clue about tackling the grave crisis.

Baidyanath, an aged tribal in Memari’s village, has been cultivating a local landlord’s plot as a bargadar. “True, the government has announced that it would purchase paddy from the farmers with MSP (minimum support price), but we are yet to get that,” the peasant says.

Like Baidyanath, many farmers, who can afford to wait, have been compelled to hold on to their produces — with the hope for a better price in the coming months. For the record, there are 200 quintals of paddy lying unsold in the house of Saha, the latest victim of the tragedy. After the first incidents of farmers’ suicide reported in the media, the government announced its MSP for this season as Rs 1,080 and Rs 1,120 — depending on the quality of the produce. The administration has asked the farmers to open an account at nearby banks, so that the government could make direct payments, thus eliminate middlemen.

However, by the time the government declared its support price, the distress sale of paddy has been almost complete. The small farmers, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the Bengal’s peasantry, are traditionally depended on moneylenders as the commercial banks and cooperative banks are reluctant to offer credit to small farmers.

Murshidabad, a district where agriculture is the main occupation of most of the people, has peasants totalling 36 lakhs. But the record of Central Cooperative Bank, which is responsible for offering credit to the farmers through its 390 branchs, is abysmally poor. In 2008-09, the bank gave loan to 16,818 peasants to the tune of Rs 15.30 crore. In the following year, the number of the peasants doubled: 30,220 of them got loan from the bank — to the tune of Rs 30 crore. Year 2010-11 had 34,533 peasants who got loan amounting to a total Rs 48 crore.

The record makes it evident that banks cover only a small fraction of the peasantry. The rest are dependent on the rural moneylenders. Therein lies problem with today’s crisis in the state’s agriculture. The reluctance of the banks to forward credit to small farmers pushes them to take loan from moneylenders.

According to peasants in Burdwan and Murshidabad, rural businessmen, who deal in fertiliser and pesticide among other, also act as moneylenders. They offer credit to the poor peasants at a monthly rate of 10% interest (annual rate 120%) and realise the loan in kind that is by taking the produce of the peasants.

In Murshidabad’s Boroa. Ananda Gopal Das committed suicide in June 2010. After that, his family paid back the loan Das had from the local cooperative bank. Later, when they tried to apply for fresh loan, the bank rejected their application. The family was thus forced to take loan from the moneylender.

Das’s family hold that though the banks charge seven per cent interest against agriculture loan, they don’t encourage small farmers much. Thus, the paddy is put on distress sale by the small farmers who have taken advance from the moneylenders. The same paddy, when the administration enters into the scene, is resold to the government by the middlemen-cum-moneylenders. The crisis in state’s agriculture deepens triggering off the farmers’ suicide in Bengal.