TUESDAY, MAY 06, 2025
Plight of agrarian community in India
Published on Mar 16, 2025
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- It’s high time for India to prevent farmers’ suicide as agrarian distress may spoil the country’s growth potential severely. According to the experts, if immediate steps are not taken the problem may snowball into a bigger social crisis that will deter future generations from taking up agriculture as a profession. Already the country has witnessed a sizable fall in the numbers of persons working in the framing sector. Any further decrease in that number will make it difficult to carry on agricultural activities in the country. They have further argued that the government should conduct a thorough examination of its agricultural policies in order to provide much-needed relief to the farming community, instead of knee-jerk reactions like occasional loan waiver. It may be mentioned here that on an average nearly 2500 farmers commit suicides every year in the country, with Maharashtra topping the list by recording over two thousand such deaths every year. The Vidarbha region of the state has virtually turned out into a minefield, with Marathwada holding the second spot. On March 13 last, young farmer Kailash Nagare ended his life by consuming poison as the authorities didn’t pay any heed to his repeated pleas about releasing water for irrigation from the nearby Khadakpurna dam.
- This is not an isolated incident. From the available figures, it is clear that the Indian farming community has been trapped in a vicious cycle that leads to poverty due to low productivity and vice-versa. Lack of funding, inadequate irrigation facilities combined with unpredictable climate conditions due to global warming, all combined together have proved to be a bane for the farmers in India. This is the reason behind the large-scale shifting from farming to other sectors. Beyond a doubt, it is a dangerous trend that should be prevented at any cost as it may disturb the food security situation in the country, in absence of which the people will have to buy foodgrains at exorbitant prices as the country will have no other options but to import essential food items. Thus, the need of the hour is to provide all necessary help to the farmers to enable them to produce more, which will also help the country to grow.
- It is quite astonishing that despite more than 50 per cent of the country’s workforce being involved in agriculture, the conditions of the farmers continue to deteriorate, along with this sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP. Apart from the first five-year plan (1951-56) in which various multipurpose projects were built to help irrigation, no such efforts were taken in the following years making it really difficult for agriculture to survive in the country. It is also responsible for restricting the good effects of ‘Green Revolution’ in the sixties to Punjab, Haryana and certain parts of western Uttar Pradesh only as the rest of the country had no irrigation facilities worthwhile to reap a good harvest from the high-yielding seeds used in this purpose. As the situation remains mostly unchanged in the next five and a half decades, the plight of India’s agrarian community is easily understandable.
Nagaland Districts
