The Hindu Business Line : Statistics may not tell the real tale

The Union Minister for Agriculture, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Mr Sharad Pawar, speaking at a meeting in Pune on May 8, categorically stated that suicides by farmers are not a new phenomenon and that there has been no increase in the proportion of farmers' suicides to the total over the last few years.

Understandably, his statement provoked sharp reactions. Mr Pawar got an opportunity to clarify his position in both the Houses of Parliament in the debates on "The farmers' distress and the import of wheat from Australia" on May 19. He presented before the Rajya Sabha: ``The comparative statistics of the number of suicides in all cases and in agriculture sector in all States and Union Territories of India'' compiled by the Ministry of Home Affairs. The Minister assured the House that the statistics was dependable on matters such as suicides, as the basic information was recorded by the police stations in the areas where the tragedy had occurred.

According to the statistics, the proportion of farmers' suicides to total suicides has remained more and less stable between 2000 and 2003. The actual percentages for these four years were 15.29, 15.13, 16.28 and 15.48 per cent respectively. The all-India average for the period 1995-2003 was 14.87 per cent and, therefore, the Minister asserted that there had been nothing like a spate of suicides over the last two-three years.

One can, of course, ask whether the proportion of farmer suicides to the total is a good measure of the distress and the desperation of the farmers. That ratio would, at best, show the relative proportion of desperation of the farm community vis-à-vis the nation as a whole.

All that the figures suggested was that the degree of desperation among farmers remained constant in proportion to that of the general population.

The proportion of the agrarian population in the national population appears to have remained stationary at 60 per cent for quite some time. As a result, the non-farm population is around 40 per cent of the aggregate population.

Curiously, 40 per cent of the population seems to account for 84 per cent of the suicides in India, while 60 per cent of the agrarian population accounts for only 16 per cent. Does this mean that the propensity of the general population towards suicide is much higher than that of the farmers?

The higher incidence of suicides among the smaller non-agrarian population, probably, indicates that the recording of the data in non-rural police stations is better than that of the police stations in the countryside.

There is another anomaly too. The statistics puts the figure of farmers' suicides at 137,621 — three-four times the numbers provided by the State governments and endorsed by the Centre until now.

The contradictions

The statistics furnished in the Rajya Sabha reveals quite a few contradictions:

In the years 1995-2003, in Andhra Pradesh — probably the State with the highest incidence of suicides — at 17.02 the ratio of farmer suicides to the general suicides (RFS/GS) was only slightly above the average of 14.87. In Karnataka, this was slightly higher at 20.24, and in Maharashtra 19.40.

These are within the tolerance limits of the distribution of the RFS/GS values. The extraordinarily higher RFS/GS readings are to be found for Chattisgarh: 31.54 and the Union Territory of Daman and Diu: 39.91.

The beneficiary

In most cases, the farmers committing suicides are the heads of a landowning family. There are hardly any cases of landless labourers committing suicide. This is understandable, as the situation of the landless labourer is better than that of the land-owning farmer.

The former does not have to shoulder the burden of the vagaries of the monsoon and the tyranny of the government. He is assured of a certain daily incomewhich is not affected, post facto, by the failure of the crops or the fall in prices. The landless labourer is, thus, economically better off than the landowning farmer.

The statistics given to the Rajya Sabha brings out the enormity of the problem rather than an "all well" situation that is sought to be portrayed.

Surely, Mr Pawar is seriously concerned about the spate of suicides in different States, particularly in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. So he must realise that any statistics that under-plays the phenomenon of farmer suicides must be viewed sceptically.

So he must verify the sources and the dependability of the data as also the method of compilation and the relevance of the same to the problem of farmer suicides, especially when the figures suggest that suicides are not necessarily an agrarian phenomenonand that the non-agrarians commit suicides as frequently as the farmers.

(The author is founder, Shetkari Sanghatana and Member of Parliament — Rajya Sabha. He can be reached at sharad.mah@nic.in)

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