As we head for another year of trouble in the countryside, it is time to discard the enduring media tropes of rural distress. Like the image of a grizzled Indian farmer, framed against his parched field looking up at an unrelenting sky. Or the all too pervasive conflation of rural distress with farmer suicides. Such characterisation offers the perfect escape route for framers of policy, who would like nothing better than to cast the cause of distress as a natural, near-cosmic phenomenon (best embodied by the sky-gazing farmer) and its effect as the not fully settled question of farmers' suicides.
This is not to dismiss the role of a natural (or meteorological) dimension to looming crisis, of the kind that is confronting Maharashtra's Marathwada, or to deny that some farmers there are taking their lives out of rural distress. But it may be worth noting that the alarm bells of poor rainfall have been sounded in Marathwada for at least the past three years. That has done nothing to slow down the relentless promotion of water-guzzling sugarcane at the expense of less water-intensive crops. There is the attendant failure of creating viable irrigation networks meant to diminish the impact of a poor rain year. Persist on this line, and the journey will take you far away from celestial symptoms to more temporal ones: in this case, the Nationalist Congress Party's deep stakes in both the sugarcane and dam economy. And the solutions will confront themselves equally starkly: not so much organising handouts for farm widows but the very real possibility that sugarcane cultivation has to be dramatically reduced for any serious restoration of water tables.
As for the far more fraught question of suicides, I have myself reported on the phenomenon from rural Maharashtra - the suicide trope exerts a compelling pull that few journalists can ignore. This is not the media's fault alone. We operate in an uneasy dynamic with an urban readership that has little attention for what unfolds in the hinterland unless it is suitable humanised. (One newspaper last week even urged its readers to Adopt a Farm Family.) But anecdotal experience gleaned from my forays into 'suicide reporting', as well as the study of suicide data, suggests that over-emphasis on suicide as the main window into troubles of the Indian farmer is a mistake. When politicians, in however self-serving a manner, argue that factors that lead to the eventual taking of life - whether for a farmer or any other member of society - is a grey area, not easily tabulated into X or Y reason, they are not entirely wrong. (The process of official tabulation itself is riddled with loopholes.) When it is pointed out that farmer suicides as a percentage of overall population of farmers does not suggest a widespread epidemic - and that other social groups like housewives have a much higher rate of suicides - that is not wrong either. The list of such anomalies that can muddy the waters of the rural distress-farmer suicide equation is long, and the subject for another debate at another time.
For now, it is high time we firmly locate the reporting of rural distress in causes and symptoms that leave no room for those in charge to wriggle out of their complicity. This simply does not happen often enough. How often do you see persistent questioning of bankers on why the networks of rural credit are withering away? On why debt-to-equity ratio is heavily weighted against farmers compared to infrastructure companies already neck deep in bad debt? How often are governments asked why there is no substantial state-backed crop insurance scheme of the kind that exists in the US or China? How often is there the exposing of the widespread political complicity that allows agricultural mandis to be run as cartels?
This requires doggedness and persistence, and the abandoning of cherished cliches, but may better serve the cause of the skyward gazing farmer, and the bereaved families holding framed photographs of their main breadwinner.
The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7
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